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French Solar Road was a Failure

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

FatPhil writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @02:48PM (#884126)

    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...?

    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...