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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.
Nuff said
https://www.youtube.com/user/T...
Once you have achieved a feat like this, the last thing you want is for your shiny new solar road thingy to be destroyed by tigers. I've got access to the finest all natural tiger repellent. I've been wearing it for a year and haven't had one tiger mess with me. Please have the people in this city's procurement office give me a ring, and I will give them a great price. While I have them on the line, I will mention some of my other offerings: hyperloop, water seer, and magic beans.
The taxpayers of this town are the real VIP.
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.
There is no benefit, is just people being ignorant and/or not being able to do math. Solar panels, even when installed in a great place at the recommended angles and directions take a pretty good amount of time to pay for themselves, because they are quite inefficient at converting solar radiation to electrical power, when you remove the optimum installation angle, the self cleaning that this angle provides, a thicker more opaque glass to be able to handle traffic going over it, the scratches and dirt that will build over time, and other factors, the overall efficiency drops dramatically and you end up with a solar array that is crap and a road that is horrible.
To me is like the food trends, like detox, for the ignorant they sound plausable and even great ideas, but to anyone in the field they are clearly a scam or a delusion from a crank.
So is this a technology not even worth trying to develop with small scale pilots?
Yes, the challenges are huge but I can't help but think that it's kind of worth experimenting with if only for the improvements in roadway quality. The biggest challenges to solar roads are durability and if that problem can be solved then theoretically it can benefit any road even if you build it without solar generation.
If they can get the cost of it within an order of magnitude of traditional roads, make it last 2x or more longer and generate power it starts to seem like a worthwhile investment. You'll never get there without test segments to try ideas and see what can be made to work.
We spend a ton on roadways now using basically the same construction materials and techniques we've used for 75 years and we're bitching that solar roads won't last. Well no shit, fucking cars would't last long either if we built them like we did in 1950, either, yet we say we can't build a better road? Maybe we're not trying.
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 may know that under-inflated tires greatly reduce gas mileage. A bendy road would be similar - it would be taking energy from the cars, so they have to burn more gas to keep going. That's where the energy comes from in a piezoelectric road - from burning more gas.
If we wanted to generate electricity by burning gasoline, there are generator designs at least 250 times more efficient than piezoelectric.
Yes, the cost of this road is very high. So was the cost of all early solar panels. Solar panels have come down in cost to the point where they are now cheaper than any other source of electricity, except wind. Batteries are the same. Early battery storage was very expensive. Now the cost has come down to the point where hard headed utilities are installing battery peaking storage because it is cheap.
This road is expensive but it is a prototype research project. It may or may not turn out to be cost effective in the long run but it should be tested.
If you're worried about public subsidies, you might start with the $ 5.3 trillion a year that fossil fuels receive.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
French project actually works and it doesn't try to heat the snow away or light up that deer while it's crossing the road.
French have just made a highly durable and highly expensive type of solar panels. And they've covered a kilometer of road with those panels, for test purposes.
Solar FREAKING Highways crowd haven't made shit but a small section of sidewalk.
Consisting of 30 panels. And they missed their deadline on that cause their panel manufacturing process burned out their panels.
Both projects ARE going the wrong way about generating electricity from solar power.
But French might actually get there some day.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If you have the solar panels at an angle, it's hard to drive on them!
Not if they are on a heavily banked high-speed turn. Perfect for high-speed European driving.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
This road is expensive but it is a prototype research project. It may or may not turn out to be cost effective in the long run but it should be tested.
Why should it be tested? What problem is this solving? Know where there is tons of cheap, empty space for solar panels? Land *next* to highways. They are putting them in all over the place in my area. You can also put them in over parking lots. And on top of factories (*much* cheaper than putting them on homes.) We can do all of this *now*
Because we waste money on fossil fuel subsidies doesn't mean it's also OK to waste money on bad engineering projects.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
This looks like a Research project, not an Infrastructure project. Its not intended to solve a problem today, its intended to better understand moving an idea from the laboratory to the real world in the future. In short its an experiment, investigating a day when some future much higher efficiency and much more durable technology might be incorporated into roads.
$5.2 million for 30k square feet is roughly $175/sq. ft.
A quick search shows that PV solar panels generate roughly 8-10 watts/sq. ft.
Since the average price of electricity in the US is roughly $0.12/kwh, $175 would buy about 1500 kwh (1.5Mwh) of electricity.
So a sq. ft. of PV solar panel would generate $175 of electricity in about...
150000 hours -- or 6250 days -- or roughly 17 years (assuming you have optimal conditions 24/7/365).
One day as efficiency improves it may get their but it is not even close at this point.
Yeah. Once they figure out how to break thermodynamics and extract more than 100% of power through a layer of dirt and grime and snow, and with the breakthrough of unobtainium so they're durable to the point of never needing replacement.
Until then, it's a bullshit pipe dream for people who are incapable of doing math or understanding the materials requirements for building actual roads.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
If only there were other surfaces that were pointing up and couldn't be used to graze or grow food. Where could we find those? Maybe I'll ask Tesla if they have any ideas.
In the meantime the local IKEA not only powers itself but on a really sunny day generates enough to power 800 homes in the vicinity of the store. Better still it's not 97% but 100%. However that doesn't matter, because far more important than the availability is the fact that on a roof you can point the solar panels in the right frigging direction.
There is no benefit to using the roads once more suitable places are used up.
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.'"
You have to surface the road. It's not surface the road vs. install solar PV on the roof.
And if you save money surfacing the road by using pre-fab and generating some income from electricity, you have more left over to spend on roof mounted PV. Remember that in the long run, the proposition is that this road surface will be cheaper and more durable, meaning less disruption for repairs and resurfacing and the hard to estimate economic benefits that come with that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 ]
If you can spend the same or even a bit less over a few decades by installing a pre-fab road surface with solar PV, you will do it even if that PV is less efficient than it would be on a roof.
The thing is, adding photovoltaic capability to a road isn't trivial. At all.
It's not just using the king of "coat of Photo Voltaic paint" that is mentioned in some Sci-Fi books that would be just mixed with the road's tar
(that would be rather trivially simple, if it existed).
It's need to go at great length and expenses to achieve the engineering feat of taking something which is expensive and fragile and never designed to sustain repeated mechanical stress (a solar panel) and try to engineer around the limitation to cram it into a road tile.
To be more precise :
There are advantages to pre-fabricated surfaces mass produced in a factory and quickly laid on site. The fact that they can put solar PV in the surface is just a bonus to reduce total cost of ownership.
The problem is this thing you call "a bonus" (adding a PV panel into the pre-fab surface) is not a small feat at all.
In the current state of affairs (technology available in this decade), it will require a tremendous amount of engineering, cost a tons of money, will require an enormous amount of compromises in order to pull of...
The sheer amount of investment to achieve this completely dwarfs any potential reduction of cost of ownership.
All the while putting the solar panel beside the road is a viable and much cheaper solution.
This is exactly the same kind of overcomplicated and expensive over-engineering, like trying to cram an electric handle bar warmer in a bike, when you could just use fucking gloves
(But who knows, as regular PV panel become more popular, and strat to be put to lots of use, maybe by next decade, they will get much cheaper and slowly become more durable. To the point wher in 2026 it might be not stupid to try to find a way to engineer them into pre-fab pavement).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nuclear powered roads is the solution that NIMBYs won't let us have.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.