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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday December 28 2016, @07:32AM
from the checking-the-cost-benefit-numbers dept.
from the checking-the-cost-benefit-numbers dept.
France has opened what it claims to be the world's first solar panel road in a Normandy village.
A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.
It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents.
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World's First Solar Panel Road Opens in Normandy Village
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:43PM
The manufacturing processes to create hexagonal cells is valid, cost efficient, and scaleable. (Or alternatively creating square circuits on roads work, or the waste from jamming squares into hexagons isn't "too much.")
I would have expected you, of all people, to favour hexagonal tesselation. Please consider changing your username to T-square. There is a group that wants to build roads from hexagonal modules:
/article.pl?sid=14/05/23/0017212 [soylentnews.org]
/article.pl?sid=16/10/06/1855218 [soylentnews.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Roadways [wikipedia.org]
A glance at the photo which adorns the article reveals that this project in France isn't that. It appears to have rectangular cells arranged, brick-like, into larger rectangular panels.
Photovoltaic cells are made in hexagonal, circular, and other shapes. For the kind that are made from silicon wafers, a circular cell means the least wasted sillicon, since the wafers are inherently circular. Hexagonal cells offer efficient coverage of surface area in use, with some wasted silicon. Square cells also offer efficient coverage of surface area in use (more efficient, if the area is rectangular) but incur more wasted silicon.
http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/341514/view [sciencephoto.com]
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4089705.html [freepatentsonline.com]