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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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @03:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @03:03PM (#884140)

    We experiment, we fail, we improve, we iterate. We learn and benefit from every step. This is the most basic principle of science.

    Well sortof. Science is a process that involves prediction of results.

    Science tells us that installing solar panels flat on the road surface will have predictably bad results for several reasons, not the least of which the suboptimal angle that pisses away a huge amount of the power generation capability for the given installation area.

    So that's why people get pissed when municipal governments throw public money at projects like this to check of "green initiative" boxes, when there are so many better ways to use that money for solar generation that actually work today (such as installing panels on rooftops).