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World's First 'Solar Panel Road' Opens In France (theverge.com)
The world's first solar road has officially opened in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France. The road is 1 kilometer long and can generate enough electricity to power the street lights. The Verge reports: That might not sound very impressive for 30,000 square feet of solar panels -- and it kind of isn't, especially for its $5.2 million price tag. The panels have been covered in a silicon-based resin that allows them to withstand the weight of passing big rigs, and if the road performs as expected, Royal wants to see solar panels installed across 1,000 kilometers of French highway. There are numerous issues, however. For one, flat solar panels are less effective than the angled panels that are installed on roofs, and they're also massively more expensive than traditional panels. Colas, the company that installed the road, hopes to reduce the cost of the panels going forward and it has around 100 solar panel road projects in progress around the world. Earlier this year, Solar Roadways partnered with the Missouri Department of Transportation to upgrade a small stretch of the historic Route 66 roadway with solar-powered panels. They too are facing the same seemingly insurmountable cost problems as Colas and the French.
There must be people in high places who can't add, for these projects to be getting built.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
They find out that installing those panel on the side of the road at an angle will greatly increase the power output, and that you don't need to keep cleaning the panels, and that with nothing to interrupt the sun light and effectively turn off sections of panels, they can also increase the power output, and that without heavy vehicules running over and screating the panels, they can have constant power output for the lifetime of the panel, and that you don't need to interrupt traffic everytime a panel gets damage and kill a whole section, and that.....
Solar panel roads are just plain stupid.
The benefit is pork, Son. Pork.
Can someone tell us what the benefit of these solar "roadways" is that isn't apparent and justifies the absurd expenditure vs. installation on roofs and open fields? I am truly at a loss to explain why this technology continues to be ramrodded into deployment.
An experiment.
Not too many years ago, some folks were saying the same thing aout any solar installations.
I'm big on solar, and I doubt this particular experiment wll work out that well. But it won't work out at all if no one tries it.
I suspect that you don't actually like solar for some reason or other, because you appear to have the attitude that this ramrodded Research in solar Must Be Stopped!
Any other promising research that you want stopped?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The "benefit" (and I use that word loosely) is that it sounds like a wonderful idea to innumerate, scientifically illiterate people who say to themselves, "It's such a waste, having all those roads take up so much space. If only we could put them to better use!" And then those people decide to "invest" money in a company that promises to build solar roadways, or else that company persuades some politicians to spend money to demonstrate the technology, and make all those roads "better".
Case in point: Solar Roadways, who collected $2M in crowdsourced funding through the use of a clever video ("Solar Freakin' Roadways!"). Now more companies are joining the gravy train. When people with more money than sense are willing to spend millions to create a system that will produce a few thousand dollars of electricity over its lifetime, there are plenty of companies that are quite willing to build useless prototypes.
The interesting part is that the lay people who want to believe in solar roads will actually get defensive when you point out that it would make far more sense (and be far cheaper) to put solars panels on every rooftop, instead of imbedding them into roadways. They want those "useless" roads to be put to better use; logic and expense be damned.
Or... It's just a stupid idea that everyone should know will fail from the start? I don't need to put my cat in the stove to know it's a bad idea anymore than I need to spend millions on solar panels in the road to know that's a bad idea.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Any other promising research that you want stopped?
You seem to be assuming that this project is promising. With a bit of basic math, you can figure out that the costs are insanely high, aren't likely to come down any time soon, and would be much better spent building regular solar farms that we know work pretty well.
How about we stop this terrible project, and spend the money on something more promising? Storing energy created by solar/wind is still a pretty big issue, how about throwing some money at that problem?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
You said it yourself. The road is already there. Probably 97% of the time any given square inch of it is open to the sky to absorb whatever radiation might be coming in, assuming reasonable traffic loads, speeds, and spacing.
This is real estate that would otherwise be wasted, whereas open fields might be used for other purposes and just maybe the owners of the roofs might have their own ideas on how to employ that incoming energy.
Crying pork is no excuse. Pork drives lots of things, including fossil fuels. It has no special bearing on a project like this versus any other way the government steals from the taxed and gives to businesses.
Crying futility is just pathetic. Some people will object to alternative energy no matter how it's handled, and I figure that they likely either have a vested interest in fossil fuels or are genetic throwbacks to the cave people who sat outside in the cold because that new-fangled fire stuff was obviously inferior and would never amount to anything. I mean really - what will you do when the wood burns up? What then, eh?
Or... It's just a stupid idea that everyone should know will fail from the start?
Perhaps. But what does fail even mean? As I noted in another post, the likely test subject in this whole thing is the material the cells are in, and the connections. Its a tough environment.
So many science/technology projects have a lot of failures. And the earlier you go in the research, the more likely the failure, and the more likely you know it will fail.
I don't need to put my cat in the stove to know it's a bad idea anymore than I need to spend millions on solar panels in the road to know that's a bad idea.
That is a little bit of a non sequitur. There has been a lot of progress in glasses in recent years. The wildly reviled (on Slashdot anyway) solar shingles that the wildly reviled (on Slashdot anyway ) Elon Musk are an interesting bit of technology that is pretty darn strong. Quite likely the cell coverings are made of something similar.
But are you saying that this is some impossible thing that can never ever be accomplished, therefore we should never ever ever try to find out if it can? Should the US do a pre-emptive nuclear strike on France to make certain that they only spend their money the way we dictate?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Of course they could stick panels on roofs or mount them on poles above ground, but perhaps the purpose of the experiment (since it is an experiment) is to see what happens when they do it like this. What are the costs, problems and benefits of such a solution compared to other ways? The only way to tell is to try.
That's a fallacy. It's not an either-or proposition.
Yes, it is. There is only so much money to go around and solar panels can only be produced so fast. It would be better to spend the same effort producing panels which are actually useful, and installed in an intelligent location.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once they start mass production the cost will fall. When considering the cost, you have to factor in labour costs and the cost of closing the road for the time required to resurface it too, and how long the road surface will last, and what the on-going maintenance costs are.
And in the meantime, putting the solar panels *beside the road* (*) is still cheaper, more energy efficient and their installation is a tiny bit less invasive to traffic.
--
(*) : like roofing over a bike path, on the roof of noise barriers, or simply along the road, etc. I.e.: places where the surface also belongs to the department of public roads, but where the panels are much more efficient by being better oriented and not shadowed by the traffic, where aren't subject to constant wear and tear by said traffic, and thus won't need tons of engineering to come up with a solution that could protect tham (like TFA's silicon layer).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]