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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.
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.
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
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
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 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).