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posted by martyb on Friday August 23 2019, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the summoning-thunderf00t dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday August 23 2019, @04:37AM (3 children)

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Friday August 23 2019, @04:37AM (#883917) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @06:00AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @06:00AM (#883934)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @03:13PM (#884148)

      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

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday August 23 2019, @03:58PM (#884177) Journal

        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.