SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.fudzilla.com/news/49241-french-solar-road-was-a-failure
A one kilometre "solar road" project paved with photovoltaic panels in France is "too noisy, falling apart, and doesn't even collect enough solar energy".
Le Monde describes the road as "pale with its ragged joints", with "solar panels that peel off the road and the many splinters [from] that enamel resin protecting photovoltaic cells".
It's a poor sign for a project the French government invested €5 million, or $5,546,750. The noise and poor upkeep aren't the only problems facing the Wattway. Through shoddy engineering, the Wattway isn't even generating the electricity it promised to deliver...
Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area. At the time, the region's capital city of Caen only got 44 days of strong sunshine a year, and not much has changed since.
Storms have wreaked havoc with the systems, blowing circuits. But even if the weather was OK it appears the panels weren't built to capture them efficiently... Solar panels are most efficient when pointed toward the sun. Because the project needed to be a road as well as a solar generator, however, all of its solar panels are flat. So even within the limited sun of the region, the Wattway was further limiting itself.
Also: Turns out a Road Made of Solar Panels Was, in Fact, a Bad Idea
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:07AM (4 children)
The budget went into my cousin's pocket at least. :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:30AM (3 children)
For 1km of solar road 5.5 mil doesn't seem too crazy.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday August 23 2019, @03:05AM
5m for a test project that gets .6 miles of test area is a pretty good deal, especially for new tech. I am not one who would have any faith in something like this working, but it would have been nice if it did. The cost of trying was low so it was a good try.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @04:14AM (1 child)
That is actually bad for three reasons. The Colas road requires being built on an already existing road. Said roadway was a single lane. The average highway cost in France is 4.5 million Euros (IQR 3 mil to 5 mil) per lane-km of asphalt road with a 15 year minimum lifespan.
To add a bit of reference, a recent French highway project that came in at 110 million Euros per km had an extreme outlier effect on that mean.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 23 2019, @11:19AM
> The average highway cost in France is 4.5 million Euros (IQR 3 mil to 5 mil) per lane-km
It isn't fair to compare a prototype with existing technology.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:33AM (20 children)
Lest anyone forget, wind farms were also failures the first time around in the 60s and 70s and 80s. They just weren’t economical enough once the oil crisis ended. That does not mean that solar roads will be successes some day, but it is a good reminder that to science even negative results are still net gains for knowledge. Maybe the next time around, it will simply be to put solar receiving panels in the median of an interstate.Or set up a small solar farms at interchanges to power the lights.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @04:16AM (6 children)
Or people can put them on roofs, so that way they are near where the energy is used and don't have cars or debris on them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday August 23 2019, @02:51PM (1 child)
Brilliantly insightful. (seriously) It's too bad that it isn't obvious to more people. But then being non-obvious means that the idea might be patentable. Hmmm. Solar panels on roofs?
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:26AM
For their 5million, how many roof-tops could have gotten solar panels?
Yeah: sounds like a better investment.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 23 2019, @04:12PM (2 children)
I posted the parent. "People" can put them on roofs. Whose roof, and how much are you compensating them for using that space? If this was meant to be a public project (no idea if it was but why else would you use a roadway?), then why not use public right of access that's going unused?
Then again, unlike TFA I'm looking for solutions and not to laugh at the problems that bleeding edge research engineering can create.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @10:17PM
Their own roof, no need for compensation. Consumer solar panels are advertised as budget-neutral, in the sense that their lifetime production value exceeds their installation cost. For example, in NL, with tax rebates, the expected break-even time is 6-10 years, less than a third of the typical panel lifetime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:32AM
For starters, their own. For example, my state's DOT has 18 stations that they own or lease. Even if they can't negotiate panels on top of the leased spaces, that leaves 6 stations that they own outright, and 4 that are space in other state facilities. Then there are over 20 other facilities for their regional offices, plow shelters, main office, etc. On top of that, we are dealing with state money, so its not that hard to use facilities and buildings used for other subdivisions of the state.
Now I don't live in France, but I'm sure there are plenty of public buildings they could put solar arrays on.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 23 2019, @10:14PM
I could only see solar roads working if we found a method of recessing the panels, which in current technology are fairly fragile, beneath some sort of protective cover. Maybe using only the heat generated by solar radiation? I suspect the idea is a no go on any heavily traveled roadway, but maybe it could help in suburban residential areas. I can't see it providing the sole means of energy for an area without a significant leap in technology.
I believe if we are going to have a future with continuing use of energy at something like current levels, in the long run we are going to have to mostly discard the idea of centrally generated "big power". Buildings will have to be as energy efficient as possible, wasting as little energy as possible while also using any and all environmentally viable means (solar panels, geothermal, wind, etc.) to produce as much of their own power as possible. Every means of generating power on man altered surfaces should be considered. The difference should be made up by smaller, more local communal power plants, eliminating the inefficiency of long range power transmission. The NIMBY types will have to accept that if they want power in their homes they will have to be producing most of it in their "backyards", and people might have to accept the idea of "ugly" houses festooned with wires, panels, dishes, etc...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by qzm on Friday August 23 2019, @04:17AM (12 children)
Solar roads have been well proven in so many ways to be one of the most stupid ways of approaching solar generation.
In fact, it is very difficult to think of one single positive feature of them...
what are are suggesting has nothing to do with a 'solar road', solar cells near a road are not a solar road.
Solar Road is really the equivalent of saying 'lets build windfarms indoors, because... reasons.'
Still, I have no doubt a few arseholes made a pile of money off peddling this particular greenwashing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @05:07AM (4 children)
The current tech is clearly a terrible idea. But if we spend the next 20 years failing to make it work, we may well wind up with some photovoltaic bulk aggregate material that we can just dump out the back of an asphalt mixer truck, or spray on like paint along with the lane markings. At that point, you can imagine a solar road being almost exactly the same cost as a nonsolar road.
Think of it as a long-horizon research experiment rather than something expected to be useful in the 1.0 version, and it makes more sense to figure out how close the estimates are to the actual practice. Figuring how much worse the real road is than the estimates is still a useful data point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @05:47AM (2 children)
Sounds awesome! Let us know if someone ever invents that. Also it has to be in the ballpark of the durability of regular asphalt or concrete and cheap enough to be worth the energy it produces. If it's aggregate, it has to be cheap enough that you can pour a few centimeters thick layer of it, because roads need to be thick to deal with wear. If it's spray-on, it has to be very very cheap and tolerant of erosion. Lane markings get repainted all the time, the actual road surface lasts much longer.
Pouring money down these phony projects doesn't advance any of the necessary technology, which just doesn't exist. It just enriches con men at the expense of the taxpayer.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday August 23 2019, @12:52PM (1 child)
Don’t forget to address the problem of keeping the surface free of contamination that might attenuate light reaching the photovoltaics.
Let’s face it, it’s an absolutely terrible idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @07:02PM
And traffic would count here as contamination...
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday August 23 2019, @08:48AM
Even then, why would you put in under the wheels, instead of over the wheels? Having a roof-top would turn many of the disadvantages into advantages, plus it would be much simpler to follow technological progress (spray over the roof-top with traffic going instead of closing the road/lanes for days).
(Score: 2) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday August 23 2019, @06:31AM (5 children)
Actually it's easy to think of one. (Emphasis on "one".) They don't take away any area that could be used for something else (like farming, et.c.) This is where this whole idea had its origins. We have all this road surface that's only being used to drive vehicles along... What if we could use it for generating electricity at the same time...? But, yes other than that, I'm hard pressed to see any redeeming features for the idea. The problems they're having were entirely predictable, and given the wear and tear roads are subjected to, I'm very skeptical that they will ever be able to solve them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @06:33AM (2 children)
Sure but much of that surface is being covered with .... cars. Unless you have transparent cars that allow usable sunlight through it seems like the cars themselves will act as an obstruction.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 23 2019, @09:09AM (1 child)
Maybe you should look at roads (at times where there's no traffic jam). Under normal operation conditions, only a fraction of the road is covered with cars.
For example, consider this image, [umweltbundesamt.de] which actually shows quite dense traffic. But still there's clearly more uncovered than covered street surface.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @01:05PM
Still looks like much of the road is covered with cars.
Traffic is just one of the many factors that reduce efficiency.
It should also be noted that traffic tends to be heavier during the day than at night or at 2AM in the morning. During the times of least traffic there is also the least sunlight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:48PM
This argument might have merit but only after every available rooftop has solar panels on it such that building any more solar panels on rooftops is not possible. At the moment the vast majority of rooftops do not have solar panels on them.
Building solar panels on rooftops makes so much more sense: you can angle the panels correctly, the electrical infrastructure is already installed in the building, oh, and the solar panels are not subject to having cars driving on them.
Even then, the road space can still be used for solar power by putting panels above the vehicles, which seems to make a lot more sense than putting the vehicles above the solar panels...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 23 2019, @07:30PM
The thing is, there's an obvious alternative to putting solar panels in the road itself, suggested by solar roadways opponents: Build structures above the roads and put the panels on that. With an added advantage of providing shade (which reduces sun glare problems and car A/C usage) and less rainwater landing on the roads (helping with traction and reducing accident rates). Or even better, build those kinds of structures over the acres of parking lot we have in the US. Now you're even somewhat sheltered walking from your car to the entrance to the MegaSuperMallMart.
But no, we've got to put these panels in a place where they'll be repeatedly run over and scratched up by 18-wheelers for some reason.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 23 2019, @05:53PM
Well to be fair, NOW they've been proven. Previously it was merely hypothesized that they suck!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday August 23 2019, @02:52AM (1 child)
I wonder if their technology was in any way similar to the US project underway.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 23 2019, @07:34PM
There was. It was installed on a sidewalk, not on an actual road, and IIRC approximately 1/3 of the units failed immediately upon installation and it never came close to generating enough electricity to even power the LEDs that were going to be lit up by it. In short, it was a complete and total failure, but for some reason they convinced people to pay lots of money for an even larger and more expensive complete and total failure.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday August 23 2019, @03:02AM (1 child)
This article [sciencealert.com] has a photo of what looks like the damage at the bottom. It says tractors caused unplanned damage. Glass is no match for heavy vehicles with big rocks stuck in the treads.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 23 2019, @09:11AM
If it's only the tractors, then the solution is easy: Just use it only on roads where tractors don't drive.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by helel on Friday August 23 2019, @03:02AM (7 children)
Can anyone explain why we need to drive on the panels? Why build a covering for the road that provides shade, collects sunlight as electricity, and even keeps the rain off? Is the cost of building an elevated structure really so high as to offset the drawbacks of driving on, to say nothing of shading, the solar panels?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @04:00AM
There is nothing to explain. There is no parallel universe, no alternate reality in which this could have been a good idea. None. But that didn't stop a bunch of sociopathic con-men from convincing another bunch of clueless, idiotic morons that it was.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday August 23 2019, @04:37AM (3 children)
In the winter, you don't want shade. It makes the road icy. And columns to hold a roof will kill people when they crash into them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @06:00AM (2 children)
What actually makes the road icy is water falling onto it, which a roof would prevent.
That's not to say that coverings would be workable. First, roads have to accommodate occasional oversize trucks. Second, the majority of roads are in urban areas where building large structures around them would be extremely ugly and inconvenient. Third, the coverings would fall down during any kind of natural disaster, seriously obstructing rescue and repair efforts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
Apparently wind doesn't exist in your world and cars don't drive through snow and ice on the non-roofed roads. If it really is just a roof with no sides then water and snow will blow in from the sides (or at the entrance and exit to the roofed sections). If it isn't just a roof then you've created the equivalent of an above-ground tunnel with solar panels on top. I'm curious how a cost comparison between doing that and just having underground tunnels for cars would be like, then wouldn't even need to build a roof over the road, you could just put in a bog-standard solar array on the ground above the tunnel.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 23 2019, @03:58PM
Switzerland has plenty of covered highways, and they seem to do fine. Of course, they cover them to keep avalanches and rockfall from blocking the roads, but the basic principle is the same. If covering roads with solar panels lowers plowing costs, why not do it? The right of way is already there, and that by far is the most expensive thing to acquire (lawyers are always the dumbest and highest cost of anything).
There does not seem to be much reason to not cover parking lots, though. The Whole Foods supermarket in Brooklyn did it [inhabitat.com]. If you're gonna cover that much land with parking spots, why not layer on an additional level of savings/revenue beyond giving customers a place to park? The cost of solar panels has dropped dramatically over the last 15 years, so break-even time has gotten much, much shorter.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 23 2019, @09:18AM
We probably will have roads for a while yet, but I wonder. What if we changed to a rail system? Solar panels would probably work a lot better on a railroad. Also, they could better withstand the much lighter weight that bike trails and walkways must bear. But as you say, better yet, roof over the road, whatever kind it is.
Another possibility: the flying car. If flying cars ever become feasible, we might be ripping out roads for the next half century.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 23 2019, @02:53PM
It's even more funnier when you consider electric cars to be the future.
The more cars on the road, the less electricity generated due to the shade from those cars. Yet those cars need electricity.
The French will think of something. What if we made cars and clothing transparent?
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 23 2019, @08:59AM
You know, 5 million Euro sounds like a lot of money, and for an individual that would be, but for a government that's effectively peanuts. France has more than 60 million inhabitants, which means that this experiment costed each inhabitant less than ten cents. And compared to the national budget, the cost in in the ppm region.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:08PM (1 child)
We experiment, we fail, we improve, we iterate. We learn and benefit from every step. This is the most basic principle of science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @03:03PM
Well sortof. Science is a process that involves prediction of results.
Science tells us that installing solar panels flat on the road surface will have predictably bad results for several reasons, not the least of which the suboptimal angle that pisses away a huge amount of the power generation capability for the given installation area.
So that's why people get pissed when municipal governments throw public money at projects like this to check of "green initiative" boxes, when there are so many better ways to use that money for solar generation that actually work today (such as installing panels on rooftops).