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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: 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?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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!