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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.
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
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?
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.