Yeah, why am I not surprised – not the brightest idea when it first came out. Doing roads is hard. Roads HAVE to be hard. Solar cells are not hard. Doubt me? Reformatted, emphasis mine:
Three Years Later, the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop
Three years later, even the most optimistic supporters have deemed the Wattway a failure. The Wattway consists of 2,800 photovoltaic panels lining one kilometer (0.62 miles) on the way to the small northern town of Tourouvre-au-Perch in Normandy. At the time of its opening its builder, the construction group Colas, part of telecoms group Bouygues, said that the solar panels were covered with a resin containing silicon, strong enough to fend off traffic even from 18-wheelers.
Sure thing. Everything is happy-dappy when you don’t have the problem domain knowledge AND using other peoples’ money! So, Problem One:
“The engineers of this project surely did not think about the tractors that would roll over,” Pascal and Eric, two local roofers leaning on the counter of the Café de Paris, Tourouvre-au-Perche, told the French newspaper Le Monde in 2019. While the resin coating might be strong enough to keep a big rig from crushing the solar panels, the two said that driving over it generates so much noise that locals required the road’s speed limit to be lowered to 70 km/h, or a paltry 43 mph.
Yeah, a WONDERFUL solution – if you can force people to behave in ways that give you the results you want. However, those drivers affected may not believe that causing them to lose THEIR time is a decent trade-off to make someone else (or their idea, look good). Would YOU be willing to make this sacrifice?
But WAIT! There’s MORE! Problem Two:
Le Monde describes the road as “pale with its ragged joints,” with “solar panels that peel off the road and the many splinters that enamel resin protecting photovoltaic cells.” It’s a poor sign for a project that French government invested in to the tune of €5 million, or $5,546,750.
Splinters. Hard splinters. Let me think, what is it that I’m missing? Splinters. Roads. Splinters and roads. Roads. Vehicles. Road, vehicals – means TIRES!. Tires – splinters. Uh-oh – tires and splinters means hard sharp pointy things and holes.
Can you say: Flat Tires?? Yeah, that’s a “feature”, right?
Well, what about its main purpose? That had to be a success, right? Oh, wait!
Problem Three:
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.
Yeah, putting a SOLAR INSTALLATION where there isn’t much sun – SOMEBODY was unaware of the basic concept: need SOLAR ENERGY to make solar cells actually work. I thought that this was a rather simple idea. Sorta like wanting to put this in the US rainy Northwest – not good placement if you want a success, eh?
But there is a GREAT solution for this:
“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.
…For its part, Colas has admitted the project is a bust. “Our system is not mature for inter-urban traffic,” Etienne Gaudin, Colas’ chief executive of Wattway, told Le Monde. The company also operates 40 similar solar roads, smaller than the one in Normandy.
Other solar roads across the globe have faced a variety of challenges. In 2018, a week after a solar road opened in China, its solar panels were stolen.
(H/T: Popular Mechanics)
