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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: 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.