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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @05:47AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @05:47AM (#883933)

    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.

    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)

    by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Friday August 23 2019, @12:52PM (#884073) Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @07:02PM (#884290)

      And traffic would count here as contamination...