The idea was terrible on paper, easily falsified by back of the napkin math. The same amount of money could have been spent on, eg, testing the commercial viability of smoothing out grid loads by making ice off peak for cooling.
Trying things helps us move forward
edit: I'm all for trying crazy moonshots. Just not down right idiotic ones that are pushed by pseudo-science and clickbait activism [1].
[1]https://www.vox.com/2014/5/14/5717036/should-we-cover-all-ou...
Isn't that saying shooting sky full of satellite for communication is stupid until SpaceX made loading anything to space 10x less expensive?
I would say the idea isn't worth trying because it clearly wasn't ready, ( I mean if napkin maths already show it is off by a factor of 10 than it really is stupid trying it ) but I don't think the idea in itself is stupid at all.
But that's the ideal. In the real world, political and consumer attention for projects like this most certainly is zero sum. They quickly get fatiguing and you already feel like you've done your bit.
In fact, it's probably even worse than zero sum in practice, because after being burned on junk like solar roads, you're far less likely to vouch or open your wallet for the next cool sounding tech that comes along.
Therefore, we should fund most probable test ideas as should any scientific endeavor. The parent post claims that this particular idea was not probable to begin with (a poor idea on paper).
It seems unlikely that well-funded scientists are _that_ stupid. It's more likely either that we're missing some reason why solar roads are more efficient at first glance, or that they have some ulterior political motive where wasting the money is intentional. Either way, laughing at them for missing things every internet commenter immediately thinks of seems like a mistake.
That said, in this case, my first thought is, "we definitely haven't run out of better places to put solar panels". The specifics don't matter much when the US has plenty of unused space to put solar farms (even just "next to the roads"). I'm pretty confused by how far the idea's gotten.
If people are still paying you for an idea that you might be somewhat sceptical about, are you going to stop doing it anyway? Maybe you will, but I imagine there are plenty of people where the money will just confirm their biases towards their work.