Who Could Have Possibly Predicted This? Solar Roads a Failure
I seem to have established a couple of tiny blogging niches for myself, as there are two things with an absolute certainty that readers will email me -- solar road stories and pictures of steam plumes used to illustrate pollution articles.
So as not to disappoint my loyal readership in these two niches, Popular Mechanics as the story of a 5 million euro solar road in France. And, surprise, it turns out that putting solar panels flat on the ground in a cloudy region and then driving over them does not work very well.
The noise and poor upkeep aren't the only problems facing the Wattway. Through shoddy engineering, the Wattway isn't even generating the electricity it promised to deliver. In 2016, the builders promised it would power 5,000 households.
There proved to be several problems with this goal. The first was that Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area. At the time, the region's capital city of Caen only got 44 days of strong sunshine a year, and not much has changed since. Storms have wrecked havoc with the systems, blowing circuits. But even if the weather was in order, it appears the panels weren't built to capture them efficiently.
“If they really want this to work, they should first stop cars driving on it,” Marc Jedliczka, vice president of the Network for Energetic Transition (CLER), which promotes renewable energy, told the Eurasia Times.
By the way, I called this particular project out as madness when it opened, so all of this was certainly foreseeable. Just so we don't let those responsible slink away from their bad judgement, this was from an article when the road was first opened
A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.
Royal has said she would like to see solar panels installed on one in every 1,000km of French highway
