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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 bigger problem is dumb voters. Many people don't understand the connection between their high taxes and popular support for squandering money on idiotic boondoggles such as this.
There is absolutely no way that anyone would ever use that sludgy black stuff that oozes out of the ground as the basis for a modern transportation system, I mean, to just get it to burn with any appreciable energy you have to subject it to all sorts of expensive and complicated refining processes that with today's modern 1800's technology simply don't make financial common sense.
I mean you've have to spend years developing proper means of doing the necessary refinement and you'd have to build plants on a massive scale. To say nothing of extraction and transportation of the raw material.
No, my friends, this isn't how a sensible government would spend your tax money - not on something that's so expensive that private concerns would hardly dare touch and with no realistic expectation of ever becoming viable. No, the future is now and always with the cheap economical reliable horse. Personally, I recommend a diverse investment portfolio. Things like buggy whip manufacturers.
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Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveller