Solar Freaking Roadways! Do you guys remember this viral youtube viral video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU
The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
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Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#32This article from 4 days ago says a solar road in the Netherlands is doing well, so it seems like the French road is just a bad design? I don’t know if they are in fact different hardware: https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-first-solar-road-turn...
The one in the Netherlands seems to be a 70m solar cycle lane. Cars will destroy a surface a lot faster than bikes. Maybe (dedicated) bike lanes would be a good place to start with this.
I think it'd be much better putting panels over roads. It uses pretty much the same footprint and it'll reduce the effect of roads being huge heat sinks they are.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#33Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes. Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! We don't know exactly what they will lead to, but they often add to progress.
> Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing!
No they are not. Solar roads do not make sense, not for a looooong time anyway.
So far, all of the currently failed solar road projects have failed in utterly predictable ways[1][2][3], and I'm certain nothing novel has been learned.
There are so many better places to put solar panels than beneath roads. If anything they should put water pipes to utilize the heat. But solar panels, that's like trying to optimize a function for another 0.03% speed while there's still order of magnitudes of trivial improvements laying on the table elsewhere.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM50P4K9UVk
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#34“Cracks have appeared, and in 2018, part of the road had to be demolished due to damage from wear and tear.” as opposed to regular roads which never crack “the road was only producing half of the expected energy” - great, so just 2 km of a solar road could power the streetlights of an entire city the size of Tourouvre, 3700 people. We shouldn’t raise the white flag so quickly. I think we need a second iteration at le…
It's a fundamentally stupid idea. Passing solar light requires transparency. Transparent materials (glass, plastics) wear quickly and make terrible road surfaces. Texturing the surface to make it a better road reduces transparency and increases wear even more.
How about solar (covered) parking lots, solar roofs, etc. It makes far, far, far, far more sense.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#35They also didn't think about the pressure and weight from tractors
I mean, the hell? I wouldn't put solar panels in a playground, because I would assume 50 pound children running around would destroy them. Obviously, motor vehicles will. And very quickly.
Is this some sort of insane joke?
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cracks don't cause a regular road to fail entirely, while if a solar panel cracks in half, it will most likely stop working. Also I don't see how solar roads make any sense when there is so much unused roof space and parking lots. Putting panels over a parking lot is much easier since you don't have to build them to withstand many-tonne automobiles, they will always be in full sunlight instead of being covered by dir…
So after my erroneous comment, i have learned that roofs, parking lots and bike lanes are better candidates. I just dint want to give up on converting asphalt to energy generators.
Think the person you responded to meant for the solar panels to be above the parking lot, not the parking lot surface. IIRC, Google has quite a far solar panels in their parking lots, where they not only generate electricity but also provide shade for the cars parked there. I've also seen a couple of rather massive solar panels in central Atlanta near CNN. I was told they were installed by Ted Turner because he has a penthouse nearby. No idea how much power they generate but it does provide some nice shade.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#37Why would this even be tried? It's an obviously terrible idea for lots of reasons.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#38Fortunately we didn't give up on flight after the early airplanes. Maybe expectations need to be adjusted, but experiments like this are worth doing! We don't know exactly what they will lead to, but they often add to progress.
I agree that we as a society generally need to afford ourselves to be brave and fail sometimes. But... this seems like such a bad idea even in theory.
Road surfaces have pretty specific and harsh needs, which currently can be mostly solved with really cheap solutions (concrete/asphalt). Photovoltaic cells on the other hand are comparably very expensive and fragile.
Surely, land can't be that expensive in most places that it makes sense to use the road surface, compared to say roofs.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#39"The engineers also didn't take into account the effects of leaves, which caused damage and limited the amount of electricity the panels could produce. They also didn't think about the pressure and weight from tractors, two locals told Le Monde."
They were warned about this.
Re: The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
#40I remember at the time this was announced, I was working at a startup in the solar PV industry. Our collective response on the workfloor was, "wow, that's an incredibly stupid idea for so many reasons". Surprised it took them so long to admit failure.