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The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure

214 points by prostoalex 7y ago

Causality1 7y ago
Anyone who bothered doing the math knew this was a horrible idea from the very start. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds
- brian-armstrong 7y ago
  For those who don't watch him, EEVBlog has had excellent videos on the feasibility of solar roadways.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    To summarize his videos: solar roadways were never feasible even in theory with quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and all of the known solar roadways projects in the world have failed or are nearing failure.
trilila 7y ago
“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 least before we call it a failure.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > “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 Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so.
  - trilila 7y ago
    Touche, a good point, but a first attempt is not usually reliable. I think we should learn more about what could be done different? Should instead all bike lanes be made of solar “panels” because the wights is all yet they would cover a large surface if they were to cover the whole city? How does a traveled road get covered in leaves?
  - DC-3 7y ago
    > Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so. Your county council evidently uses better contractors than mine!
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      It's about the thickness laid down. The thicker, the longer it lasts, because thicker beds bend less than thinner ones, and so resist cracking better.
  - dghughes 7y ago
    > Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so. More like 18 months in my region of the world.
- GhostVII 7y ago
  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 dirt and vehicles, and they can be angled towards the sun. Even in theory, I think solar roads are a failure.
  - trilila 7y ago
    i stand corrected. But why not use them for bike lanes or parking lots indeed?
  - blunte 7y ago
    I suspect the idea was partly that we already have to build infrastructure for roads; why not make the roads also a source of power? In practice it will take many iterations to reach a point where it makes sense. Or it simply may never make sense. The recent articles about some California farmlands being converted to solar fields does make sense. They were running out of water, but they had a lot of land to use for something. Even if solar roads can work, there's still the problem of relatively inefficient tranfer of power over long distances. It makes little sense to spend a lot of money to make a solar road that's far away from energy consumers since a lot of the energy produced by the road will be lost in transit.
  - trilila 7y ago
    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.
    - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      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.
- dralley 7y ago
  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.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  Road surfaces need the ability to flex while withstanding huge loads. Materials such as asphalt have this ability. Glass, in layers thick enough to support the loads necessary do not. Bitumen can also be patched and repaired relatively quickly and easily, and can use relatively simple machinery to repair/replace large sections at once. Solar panels require a lot more surface preparation, precision joining and when they break (because they will - accidents happen), leave dangerous road surfaces that cannot be easily patched/repaired. Solar Roadways won't work with our current state of technology where we need fixed rigid panels. Something that is either a replacement for bitumen, or can be mixed into it and is able to self-assemble a current pathway might be a viable option. But we're a long ways off doing anything like that.
remote_phone 7y ago
It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it. Hopefully something like this comes to fruition and we learn more and more with every iteration. Solar roads are a great idea. Maybe it means it needs daily sweeping with electric vacuum trucks or something but if it’s producing enough electricity then it’s worth it.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it. ... Solar roads are a great idea. It was a bad idea. Even in theory. The only positive thing about it is that it captured the imagination of lots of people who know nothing about solar or roads.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    The frustrating thing was that pretty every problem that arose during these trials were already known. Those who spoke up were ridiculed for being naysayers. There's a balance between those who reflexively oppose everything and those who have an informed opinion based on experience and knowledge. There was quite a bit of overlap between those who strongly supported solar roadways and the "I f*ing love science!" crowd that have turned science into something indistinguishable from magic. The original installation in Idaho ran into predictable problems almost immediately. The much larger installations had very little justification for going forward other than it was very popular with a rather vocal group of voters. Doubt any of the politicians, celebrities, or their fans who pushed this and dumped all over those with credible objections will apologize for their part in the boondoggle.
  - Endy 7y ago
    I'm of two minds about what you're saying. On the one hand, it looked like a bold failure from the start. On the other hand, it put the idea of solar generation in "unorthodox" places into the minds of normal people and city planners alike. Solar roads aren't the way to go - but how many people, having heard about the project, encouraged their city to put up solar panels on all the light & phone poles? How many people have taken the enthusiasm from this project and looked to see where they could safely generate power from secondary sources in their own lives? So it's a great idea, and it's also a massive and fairly obvious failure at the same time. The message to take away from this isn't just "solar roads were a bad idea". It's that "solar roads are a bad idea, but we should keep looking at other ways to safely generate the energy we need around roads and urban passages."
cryptoz 7y ago
Why wasn't that strip of land right by the road converted into a solar strip instead? It looks like that shoulder has almost as much physical area to it and would take a lot less wear and tear. I never understood this idea to begin with.
- close04 7y ago
  I think the idea was to take advantage of land that cannot be used otherwise.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Most roads are in rural areas with plenty of room next to them. The inventors were very aware of this, being from Sandpoint, Idaho.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
This 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-turned-out-colossal-failure-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-first-solar-road-turn...
- close04 7y ago
  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.
  - Athas 7y ago
    That sounds like a good idea. It would also give cities more incentive to keep the like lanes well maintained (even in bike-friendly cities, bike lanes are usually less well maintained than motorways). One problem is that bike lanes are often located close to shade-providing buildings or vegetation.
    - kaybe 7y ago
      How great would it be to have a roof of solar cells above the city's bike paths. No problems with precipitation or sun and less maintenance.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    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.
    - close04 7y ago
      This seems like a massive undertaking given that those panels would sit atop fast moving traffic and stand up to the elements (like tons of snow). But I'm sure at some point it will be perfectly feasible.
buboard 7y ago
Help me understand the logic behind taking a PV and stepping on it in the worst possible way, leaving dirt , rubber etc, when every PV that is exposed only to the open air needs regular cleaning / maintainance. And its being frequently under the shade of cars
- doteka 7y ago
  I'm curious how you arrived at that conclusion? Common wisdom, at least a few years ago, was "cleaning isn't worth it". (https://phys.org/news/2013-07-solar-panels-worth.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-solar-panels-worth.html)
  - rbongers 7y ago
    This is for rooftop panels though. Having regular activity on top of something is, I would assume, very different than just letting it sit.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Self-cleaning glass is a fairly mature technology and will work effectively on a rooftop solar installation. That won't work on a solar roadway, which a) needs a textured surface to provide adequate grip for vehicles and b) can't retain any sort of coating due to friction and c) is constantly being covered in axle grease, tire rubber, brake dust and the innards of various wild animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
  - imtringued 7y ago
    The article starts with the wrong assumption that you have to hire people to clean the solar panels. Robots have taken over that job a long time ago, at least for utility scale solar.
- rbongers 7y ago
  There is no logic behind it, only blind idealism. Unfortunately the couple who invented solar roads poured a lot of time and money into this idea and couldn't back down. Many people followed their enthusiasm. I think one of the most difficult things you can do as a person is to be honest with yourself and admit when something has failed or won't work and to abandon it, but stories like this are reminders to really self reflect.
_Nat_ 7y ago
Solar roads seem like a really cool technology. Like, if they worked great and were affordable and everything, then awesome! But, practically speaking, they seem to violate the [single responsibility principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principl...). By coupling a solar panel to a road, we're forcing the physical entity to comply with competing objectives. Seems like the future's prone to be different, anyway. For example, how long are we going to really need roads that're driven over at-random like today? Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels.
- sigstoat 7y ago
  > Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels. if you can drive that precisely, why even put anything in the gaps?
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    Same reason we have safety rails around roads. Plus, if we want solar roads, solar power would be a perk. I mean, once the road is dominated by self-driving cars, presumably we can implement new driving requirements beyond what human drivers could implement. For roads, we might want cars to drive over load-bearing parts, if that's optimal. Or if it's more efficient to have the wear-and-tear distributed, then cars can drive in staggered formations, much like a wear-leveling strategy in solid-state drives (SSD's). But, there's no reason to design a transportation system around the premise that self-driving cars can't control their patterns just because human-driven cars couldn't. Which isn't to say that we should assume that self-driving cars will be perfect or infallible, just that we can assume best-effort strategies. For example, we shouldn't assume that self-driving cars would never drive over a gap with a solar panel, but we can design a system in which self-driving cars try to avoid driving over the solar panels.
- kolinko 7y ago
inflatableDodo 7y ago
As was foretold. This is all very, very simple. Solar panels above heavy vehicle traffic: Good Idea. Solar panels below heavy vehicle traffic: Bad Idea. If you want to solar panel anything more heavy duty than a bike path, make a roof.
blunte 7y ago
Fortunately 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.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM50P4K9UVk [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo
  - blunte 7y ago
    Sure, I tend to agree with you. But as I posted to another reply, it's conceivable that this silly experiment will lead to improvement in material science or some other construction/manufacturing practice related to solar panels. And hey, we can't be too hard on them for perhaps jumping on a bandwagon. Solar roads seems more plausible than food delivery service on "the blockchain".
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      The only thing that they could have contributed with is making flexible solar panels. But they didn't. Instead they just put down regular panels. Assume they actually made flexible panels. They'd still have the issue of the abysmal efficiency due to the inevitable grinding of the surface and dirt filling up the cracks. You'd need frequent washing of the roads to keep them clean. Was that included in the energy projections?
namdnay 7y ago
The silliest thing about this road is that France already has very low carbon electricity, only 7.2% of electricity produced in 2018 was from fossil fuels...
dghughes 7y ago
Most solar panels are very inefficient at converting the sun to electricity so they need all the help they can get. Two things solar panels require is to be clean and to be perpendicular to the sun. A solar road achieves neither of those things.
- avip 7y ago
  They also need to keep cool, another thing being under many running cars is not ideal for.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Those things are necessary to get the opimimum amount of electricity but the point of solar roads is to sacrifice some efficiency for the benefit of having huge amounts of surface area. The amount of paved highway in developed countries is enormous, so even massively inefficient solar roads could supply all the electricity necessary and more.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Could you talk more concretely? What is the back of the napkin calculation for total power if some percent of all highways were solar?
    - panopticon 7y ago
      Not OP, but I was curious: Let's assume a good solar panel yields 15 watts per square foot under direct sunlight. The DOT estimates about 1.5 million acres of interstate in the US. Without getting too complicated, let's assume we produce at our ideal wattage for 3 hours a day. Given our ideal solar panel, this is 2.94 billion kWh per day. Getting ideal conditions on a highway surface is unrealistic, so let's assume our fictional extremely rugged solar panel can only yield 0.25 watts per square foot. Now we're sitting at 49.01 million kWh per day. To put this into perspective, the US produces roughly 11.45 billion kWh per day. So turning all of our interstates into inefficient solar panels covers less than a half a percent of our energy production. Caveat: this is shitty napkin math and omits all other paved surfaces in the US of which I'm sure non-federal roads and parking lots make up a lot of, but I couldn't find good sources for those.
hmd_imputer 7y ago
Solar Freaking Roadways! Do you guys remember this viral youtube viral video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU
- celeritascelery 7y ago
  When I first saw that video I thought, “this has to be a joke right? They can’t actually think that is feasible.” And here we are…
  - hmd_imputer 7y ago
    The video attracted so much undeserved attention that many engineers felt that they had to produce a corresponding debunk video explaining why it is such a useless idea and why asphalt is currently our best option on building roads.
mynameishere 7y ago
They 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?
api 7y ago
Why would this even be tried? It's an obviously terrible idea for lots of reasons.
WalterBright 7y ago
"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.
- tootie 7y ago
  I find it hard to believe they were really unaware. They either overestimated the durability of their devices or were running a quasi scam.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    political stunt wasting funds.. someone clueless decided or was lobbied to pick this thing.
    - degenerate 7y ago
      This + quasi-scam. There's a lot of money to be made in the "going green" space and if lying about your product gets you the contract, only the government (citizens) lose and you laugh all the way to the bank. I wish more government contracts had forced warranty / refund clauses (whatever those are called).
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        You could put those clauses in but the legal entity would simply go bankrupt. You'd need something to go after the principals to make this stick.
        egdod 7y ago
        Fraud might suffice.
  - ergothus 7y ago
    I know nothing of the details here, so this is total speculation, but I can imagine value in going with a solution you know wont "succeed", if the data you get from the failure is valuable. Like, no need to spend money trying to fix the tractor problem if the leaf problem is too severe. If in practice the leaf problem only deteriorates things by 30%, that's different than 80%, etc. Spending the money to solve problems on your first run is likely to not actually solve all of them. Then again, this could be a bold exercise in fraud and/or incompetence.
doteka 7y ago
I 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.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  If they had admitted failure earlier, then they couldn't milk as much money from suckers.
- rasz 7y ago
  What failure? They got paid handsomely.
phtrivier 7y ago
I can't imagine how hard it must have been, in France of all places, to try something that bold and risky and obvious to oppose beforehand. We're the country of ruthless self deprecation coupled with perfectionist universalism. I hope something was learnt here (other than learning not to do it again), and I'm absolutely confident the people who cluelessly pushed for it will go on their public careers unaffected while the innocents are punished. We've done more insane stuff and survived to tell the tale. But really, PV in Normandy ? Come oooooon....
- api 7y ago
  > We're the country of ruthless self deprecation coupled with perfectionist universalism. I wonder if there traits make you good at nuclear power. Perfectionism and ruthless self criticism seem like they'd engender the kind of thorough and methodological approach that keeps reactors from getting explody. The Russian "can't duck it, fuck it" attitude seems to have the opposite effect judging from the Geiger counter readings.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  >I hope something was learnt here (other than learning not to do it again) I'm afraid not - the trials played out exactly as the naysayers predicted. Most of the panels cracked under load and failed due to water ingress; those that didn't became woefully inefficient due to soiling. They were dangerously slippery even in ideal conditions, they cost much more than a conventional rooftop installation and they never generated as much electricity as a rooftop installation even when they were brand new. The whole exercise was a complete waste of time and money.
- rasz 7y ago
  French arent afraid to be weird. Let me introduce you to Renault Twizy - a road legal mobility scooter, and Avantime - the only coupe minivan even made, a 2 door with no B-pillars, sold as good as that description sounds.
meerita 7y ago
I think the best for societies is solar roofs. Much better surface availability. Solar roads, filled with thousands of cars cannot suck energy from sun so well as houses' roofs.
userbinator 7y ago
French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a local town. I don't know how reliable they are, but solar-powered streetlights are already common in some areas --- and being mounted high above on the lights themselves, the panels are far less likely to be damaged.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Wonder if that would also help reduce light pollution if the panel was wide enough compared to the lens over the light.
Smithalicious 7y ago
I never managed to see the advantages of having a solar road compared to just having a normal road with solar panels next to it. Or above it. Or literally anywhere else. In fact I can't think of many areas that still get direct sunlight that would make for a worse place to put solar panels than on the road...
- spodek 7y ago
  > Colas, the company that built the road, said in 2016 that the solar panels were covered with resin containing sheets of silicon to make them capable of withstanding all traffic. I'm going to bet they said that after the check cleared.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Considering how public bidding work here, they said that before the check was written, with everything that was necessary for winning the bid.
- Someone 7y ago
  I have serious doubts these experiments will lead to commercially successful implementations, but I don’t think it is useless to do them. Reason? Solar cells keep getting cheaper and cheaper. That makes the costs of scaffolding to hold the cells take a larger and larger share of installation costs. In the limit where cells are essentially free, putting cells everywhere there is some large horizontal area will make sense. Now, of course, we may not get close enough to that limit for this to make sense, cells may be too fragile for mounting in a road, there may be plenty of more profitable places to put solar cells, etc, etc, but that isn’t guaranteed, and we can’t tell without experimenting.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Except we don't actually need that much solar power and ground based installation is really cheap. Further road surfaces need to be transparent for solar to work, handle high loads, channel water off the surface, and provide lots of friction in a wide rang of weather conditions. It’s an extremely difficult problem, but solving it without massive reduction in panel costs is kind of pointless.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
This was a PR stunt from the beginning. We can't even make roads last 20 years with the most durable materials we can find. We make them out of rock and they still fall apart. Car windshields are scratched to hell after a decade. Grocery checkout scanner windows are made of Sapphire, nearly as hard as diamond, and still need to be replaced. Solar roads will never be a reality. Optically clear material hard and malleable enough seem a physical impossibly. Metals are the only suitable material and they cannot be made transparent due to hard physical constraints.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Lets test in production!
Erudite_Genius 7y ago
Solar roadways failed for the same reason Tesla will NEVER outsell gasoline cars: bad technology that's orders of magnitude worse than existing solutions. That being said, a huge leap forward in technology would make BOTH viable. A better road-based electricity generation plan would have been to use piezoelectric panels instead of photovoltaic ones.
Endy 7y ago
You know, I always wondered why they didn't go for solar covered sidewalks, which would provide shade to pedestrians and power to everything that needs it. Roads seem like a better place for pressure-based generation (of anything, frankly). Still, just for the enthusiasm they garnered and the continued push toward making renewable energy generation interact with the everyday, the idealists should be commended. The engineers... not as such, no. But, silly question, knowing very little about this field, couldn't it be possible to (co)generate power from the heat and pressure that roads endure on a near-constant basis?
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  Solar roads and sidewalks are a PR stunt. Abrasion is no joke, nothing optically transparent survives on the ground. You can see this easily in the cellar "pavement lights" common in NYC and other old cities. Light still passes through after a century, but maybe 20% and very diffuse. Bad for solar panels. Roads don't absorb enough energy to generate power, they're not flexible enough. They're designed to not absorb energy since it hastens breakdown. Potholes are a good example of a road surface energy absorber :) . Solar roofs are a far better bet. Elon is onto something there, but time will tell if costs can be brought down enough. Besides the good PR, solar roofs substantially reduce heat absorbtion, important in the sunny climates solar works well in. And we have a ton of wasted roof space. Many companies would willingly allow roof panels to be put up for free if the economics for power generation were good enough.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I think you misunderstood the parent, they said "solar covered sidewalks" that shade pedestrians, so roofs. Solar roofs on car parks seem good to me; better than using pasture land converted to solar farms which I'm seeing more and more in UK.
    - nullwasamistake 7y ago
      Somewhat. OP also mentions generating energy from the pavement, which I don't think will ever be reasonable. Solar car park covers are a great idea. Easier access than roofs, don't need to be water proof. Good cooling airflow underneath. Tend to be close to cities where power is easier to transport. Solar parking lot covers are the best ROI solar installations I can imagine. Surprised Telsa isn't doing this with their SuperCharger stations
atoav 7y ago
Solar roads are a prototypical example of an idea that looks/sounds cool to regular people, but is in fact totally useless. Why not just build a solar ceilling?
debatem1 7y ago
Seems like you'd be much better off floating them on a lake. There was a project a few years ago to do this both for power and to reduce evaporative loss in reservoirs, but I don't know if anything has come of it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Wouldn't you kill the lake, unless you only covered a small proportion of it.
  - pacala 7y ago
    Depends on the lake. There is a reservoir near LA covered in millions of black balls. Apparently this is a side effect of water quality regulation, direct sunlight triggers a chemical reaction that produces harmful byproducts. As a bonus, evaporation is also reduced, which matters in semi-arid climates like Southern California. https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2019/5/23/why-are-96000000-black-balls-on-this-reservoir https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2019/5/23/why-are-96000000...
    - Endy 7y ago
      If direct sunlight triggers a harmful reaction in your water, you need to reconsider what's in your water.
      - dumbfoundded 7y ago
        Not really. Bromide and chlorine are okay for humans to consume. Sunlight turns these into to bromate which is a carcinogen. https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-with-those-black-balls-in-the-la-reservoir https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-w...
        Endy 7y ago
        Okay, but do bromide and chlorine naturally occur in the water in that area? Or was it because of human meddling?
duxup 7y ago
Solar panels and roads have different properties for all sorts of good reasons. Why people want to compromise both is beyond me.
gonational 7y ago
The fact an idea this stupid was actually implemented is fucking mind-blowing. But, we should all be paying “carbon taxes” so that these same idiots can save the world.
nkoren 7y ago
Yes, solar roads were always the answer to the question of "where is the absolute worst possible place to put solar panels". This was 100% predictable.
- Animats 7y ago
  Could be worse.[1] Remember the schemes for recovering energy from traffic on sidewalks and roads? Pavegen pivoted to collecting info about people walking on their sidewalks, rather than energy. [1] https://pavegen.com/ https://pavegen.com/
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Talk about ethical whiplash. I feel especially bad for any engineers that joined to make the world a better place then found out they would be designing tracking systems...
    - en-us 7y ago
      Yeah it sure would be awful if that happened to anyone. Imagine joining a company that claims to help the world and instead you design unbelievable tracking and surveillance systems. Ha ha. Ha. sobs
      - madamelic 7y ago
        Yeah, like welcome to tech.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    >Pavegen pivoted to collecting info about people walking on their sidewalks, rather than energy. Wow. Switching from saving the world, to spying on everybody in it. That's almost a perfect microcosm of how the tech industry seems to have morphed in the last decade.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
ben509 7y ago
> The French minister for energy said she wanted to have solar panels on one mile of road every 621 miles in the country within the next five years. You can still do that! Just put them on a rail off to the side, angled to get lots of sunlight.
ctulek 7y ago
This is not a fiasco, it is progress! I am sure they learned a lot. This is how science and engineering works. We keep forgetting that. Next time, I am sure they will do better.
- bittercynic 7y ago
  It is a fiasco in the sense that it didn't work as advertised, or anywhere close.
jwr 7y ago
For some reason, solar roads are a very aggressive meme (in the classical sense of the word). They capture the imagination and blind people to engineering reality. Solar roads do not make any sense whatsoever, as you wrote pretty much any other place is better for panels.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  How so? I mean, it's an image of cars driving over something which is kind of delicate. Perhaps you mean roads with solar panels near them that feed the passing cars energy? Now that at least sounds exciting! (Although it's probably not a great idea either, not enough battery weight saving to be worth it.)
- SllX 7y ago
  They capture the imagination because there are plenty of places you don’t want to build solar panels. Namely places that you want to leave alone for ecological or recreational purposes. If you can take a piece of infrastructure that is pervasive throughout a built environment and give it additional purpose, then you can save on or reduce the land you specify for this purpose. Does it work? Apparently not, or at least: not yet. We have not successfully accomplished this, but it remains to be seen if this is a case of not yet, or never will. Experimentation yields useful data, even when the experiment is a failure. So where were the failures? The road was less durable than expected. They didn’t account for falling leaves. They didn’t produce as much electricity as they thought it would. Thunderstorms also damaged the road. But! It did produce a decent amount of electricity, it did successfully transmit it, and it did function as a road. Colas has given up and chose not to pursue this route anymore, but it isn’t a death sentence for the idea in its entirety. It is a failure of execution, and there will be a lot of failures before there is ever a success. I’ll end this with the caveat that there might not ever be a success, but it is too early to decide that and further experimentation might yield other interesting road construction technologies.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    It's not an experiment that can yield anything or teach us anything if there is no paper and no data. A fraudulent startup maybe.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
haha. The French are dumb
jostmey 7y ago
When I walk through a forest, it is full of life. There are dozens to hundreds of critters living above and below me everywhere I walk. When I walk through developed areas, it is lifeless pavement. Anything that reduces humanities footprint, leaving more land to Nature, is probably a good thing. I hope people don't give up on solar paneled roads.
- gbrown 7y ago
  If solar panel roads cause more waste and carbon emissions, while supplying less actual power, I certainly hope we give up on them. The ecological calculation requires science and engineering, not vague feelings about what's probably good.
deleted 7y ago
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einpoklum 7y ago
It was "unprecedented" in 2016 mostly because it was kind of a sketchy idea. I mean, the road will get car-exhaust-sediment on it, like any other road; and all sorts of mechanical trauma. Roads wear down, after all, one way or another. Why have panels on the roads? Is there no land available in France?
tempsolution 7y ago
Well, that's hilarious. A solar-panel road. As if obtaining power efficiently from solar energy wasn't difficult enough. No you have to also build it into a road, which is also completely useless, even if it worked. We don't have a space problem. It's not like you couldn't place these things somewhere else...
aniijbod 7y ago
Does anyone but me have the suspicion that the animosity towards solar roads was something to do with a 'nerve being touched', some kind of 'triggering'? Sure, they might not work out, but lots of stupid-sounding ideas ('a horseless carriage? Whatever next?') have turned out to work, just as much as lots of somewhat futuristic but nonetheless sensible sounding ideas have turned out not to be here yet ('flying cars are just around the corner'). Who knows, at some point in the future, with different technologies and materials, different efficiencies and performance, we might indeed find solar energy being collected from roads. Just as we are laughing right now at the current, ludicrously oversold and patently unsuccessful efforts, future generations may be laughing at our arrogant dismissal of an idea that might ultimately have just turned out to have been ahead of its time. Let's applaud the audacity of the solar roadways hubris in the spirit of uninhibited innovative endeavour, just as much as we pat ourselves on the back for having successfully spotted its obvious shortcomings and predicted its seemingly inevitable struggle for survival.
- teawrecks 7y ago
  Yeah I don't know why the article is so negative. Any engineer would look at this and say, "cool, a few more problems to solve" not "well golly, I guess there's nothing we can do about a few leaves".
  - red75prime 7y ago
    Like placing the panels above roads, for example. It helps to get optimal inclination of panels too, and reduce stress levels, and eliminates losses from cars' shadows, and simplifies maintenance, and reduces pavement costs. Some ideas are just plain stupid.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >Sure, they might not work out, but lots of stupid-sounding ideas ('a horseless carriage? It's a monumentally stupid idea. I'm surprised it isn't outright labelled as a scam. They basically cheated money out of governments and gullible people with a project that was never a good idea in the first place. Solar is the perpetuum mobile of our time.
mettamage 7y ago
Hmm... Can we just applaud that people are trying something new? Or are we going to shoot it down because of pessimism? If you know so well what works, then do your best and make it happen or write a guide on how to do experiments that almost always lead to success. They didn’t fail fast, but they failed with relatively little costs. What is 5 million to the national GDP of France? It seems to me they were trying something new, were brave and paid the price. In most cases you get nothing back.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  Yeah, this is how I see it too. It was an experiment. It failed. Things were learned from deploying it into a real-world environment. This may contribute in some way to a future technology, as often happens. HN of course is full of people who are experts on every topic, so naturally there was no need to actually perform this experiment. They could have just accurately predicted its faults and performance from theorizing alone after reading just a few articles about materials science and the properties of modern roads. While we're busy talking about the obvious and predictable failure of this experiment, we should also take a moment to also revisit the obvious and predictable failure that was Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    Unlike in dropbox case, this is something people with engineering degrees that often include physics and material sciences can actually calculate.
  - roar-of-time 7y ago
    The comments on that page are overwhelmingly friendly. And regardless, how can you even compare the two?! Dropbox fulfilled an obvious need and fulfilled it very well, whereas "solar roads" don't seem to be a solution to any problem at all!
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > Things were learned from deploying it into a real-world environment. Nothing was learned.
jacquesm 7y ago
If anybody is disappointed here then they have only themselves to blame. This was dead obvious to anybody with half a working brain and a basic idea of the concepts of road construction, photo-voltaics and general power infrastructure. Doomed to fail and should not have passed the first phase of review for feasibility. Many of the projects that have not seen the light of day are in that state because they were dumb, not because nobody thought of them before.
ijiiijji1 7y ago
Thunderf00t says Solar frickin' failure. Maybe solar tracking panels above parking lots would be better, and there's zillions of Walmarts with enormous parking areas the size of some airports that could co-locate solar farms.
dredmorbius 7y ago
There is one and only one bright spot I can see in this test: the concept was trialed under ideal conditions according to its proponents, and failed spectacularly. There's a high probability that true beleivers still won't be convinced -- their faith transcends reason and experience. The rest of us can point to this as a Provably Bad Idea. My only regret is that there aren't similarly conclusive demonstrations possible in all such cases.
- RyJones 7y ago
  http://www.whenprophecyfails.info/Conditions.htm http://www.whenprophecyfails.info/Conditions.htm
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Interesting, though I think there's more to it than just this. Belief tends to become identity. Moreover, belief becomes an ordering principle. The refutation of a belief creates the problem that there is no longer an ordering principle. This isn't always clearly obvious, but if the belief is itself part of a complex chain of interconnected beliefs, then removal of one, even if quite clearly false, creates discord within the entire structure. You've got to break down and rebuild the whole thing, which can get complicated. (Compare, by way of technical analogue, the task of refactoring a particularly messy bit of code or kit, where it turns out that a specific feature has interactions across a wide number of other areas.) The Kubler-Ross model of grief is, I'm increasingly convinced, actually a response to belief changes. The original research was based on patients informed of their own pending mortality, by way of fatal diagnoses or conditions, and how they responded. Such information is a massive disruption to belief systems. And absent some mechanism for supporting transition to a different one, the classic KR response (denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance) is highly probable. The interesting question to me is what happens in cases where such responses don't develop. Where we can and do change beliefs quickly and fluidly. What do those circumstances have in common.
caymanjim 7y ago
This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea. It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't mean it wasn't a valuable experiment.
- holmberd 7y ago
  Exactly, failure or not is a good thing, moving on.
- duck2 7y ago
  If you can deduce something from your current knowledge, you don't need to do an experiment for that. Certainly people knew that putting fragile semiconductors under roads isn't the best idea, but they went on and spent time and money. I would call this a waste.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Some people deduced one thing, and others deduced the other thing. There was plenty of excitement about this idea on this very site when it was first proposed. Seeing something once is better than hearing it a hundred times.
    - thereisnospork 7y ago
      > There was plenty of excitement The point is there shouldn't have been. Some people deduced and others hoped or willed themselves to ignorance.
    - LoSboccacc 7y ago
      only because reasonable opinion were downvoted to hell from the easily excitable crowd. I distinctly remember because I was amongst the downvoted, and dirt/rubber was one of the common concern, and it's weird to read in the article "engineers didn't think about the leaves" like, randos on internet could tell you that, what kind of cheap ass engineers were involved in the design and feasibility phase?
higherkinded 7y ago
Who would've guessed? Getting a kilometer of solar panels installed as a road (sic!) in a region that has a cloudy skies most of the time. It's borderline genius. How did it get any approval at all? Who treated solar panels being used as a road (probably to spend some more tax money on casing?) as a good idea? How is it not just obvious that it will not even get close to the easier and cheaper (rooftop panels) options? This imitation of environment care is so hilarious that I don't have the proper words to describe it.
freediver 7y ago
Lets not forget that the first electric car was also a disappointing failure.
- egdod 7y ago
  The first X was a failure for many good ideas X. But that does not mean that every (or even most) failures are just bugs being worked out of good ideas. Sometimes a failure is just a bad idea.
  - freediver 7y ago
    That was entirely my point.
    - egdod 7y ago
      Was it? It seemed like the opposite of your point.
rdiddly 7y ago
This was obviously never going to work; I think it's far more interesting as a piece of morality theater and/or a psychological ink-blot test. Because who looks at a system like this (individual humans carted around extravagantly in an energy-intensive, 4,000-pound CO2-belching murder machine, on an expensive and space-intensive road created just for them) and thinks, you know what's wrong with this system? It doesn't generate enough energy. Mmm yeah, you're almost right. Sort of like how a violent person doesn't generate enough not-punching-people. Keep going with that reasoning. See if you can use the phrase "in the first place" in your answer. It's fascinating. Obviously they seem to grasp the system has something wrong with it, and the problem has something to do with energy. But when that line of thought begins to lead them inexorably toward the conclusion that they should actually probably stop driving immediately, like today, they take a quick left turn into something else, anything else, whatever's available and "green" - SOLAR, let's do the solar. That'll absolve our sins. Hence, where do you place the panels? In the road, where the sin occurred. It's like the dim awareness of our actual transportation/energy predicament, is in the cellar of their subconscious, knocking at the door to enter conscious awareness, but not quite managing to get the person's attention. The mental contortions required to actually like this idea, remind me a lot of the ones required to maintain various states of denial. The fact being desperately avoided of course is that a set of changes far more sweeping and less pleasant than they're willing to admit or allow, are going to be necessary.
- fencepost 7y ago
  This was obviously never going to work Could be, and I suspect that a lot of the actual engineering folks involved would agree 100% on this point. They'd probably also tell you that 5 million for real - world experimental data on the exact ways in which it failed was very much worth it. Was there anything else worth responding to in the wordy pseudo-psychological insults?
  - Atheros 7y ago
    May I please read the real-world experimental data that will save other companies millions of dollars?
m3at 7y ago
If you can cope with the swearing, this is an interesting debunking of an other (US) solar road project with preposterous claims: [1] [1] https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-reasons-solar-roadways-are-fucking-stupid/ https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-rea...
mmmBacon 7y ago
There was a fairly ridiculous promotional video going around YouTube circa 2014 about a couple who “invented” solar roadways. I’ve placed a link here for your amusement. https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU
torpfactory 7y ago
The only thing roads have going for them as a location for solar is that we (humans) have a lot of road area to work with. Wouldn’t it be great if roads did double duty supporting our tires AND making some energy? I’ve always wondered if there were some way to use the space above (as in you drive under them) the roads instead. Is there a mass-efficient-enough design to make putting panels above the road a profitable thing.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
Why aren't sidewalks being turned in to solar sidewalks? I wondered how robust solar roads could be given that even concrete roads fall apart when you have thousands of cars driving on them. But solar sidewalks, that could work.
- kirrent 7y ago
  It's been done with bike paths. Also got a terrible track record with a lot of failures.
Grue3 7y ago
Made me think, what roads would actually be suitable for this? They have to be: 1) cleaned often 2) have very little traffic 3) have a very large surface And one of the solutions that pops up is: airport runways! They have a huge area, way larger than necessary to land a plane. The surface is always kept in good condition. The traffic is minimal, except for a few very busy airports. Some airports handle just a few planes a day, the rest of the time they stay unused, when they could've been producing energy instead.
- jcrawfordor 7y ago
  guess what surface area also meets this criteria: dedicated solar installations on open land. and you don't even need to disrupt airport operations for the duration of operations.
- absk 7y ago
  Why does it have to be roads? All airports have more than enough free space as it is, which can be used to set up solar panels in the most optimal way.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    I'm not an expert, but I expect that a lot of that seemingly free space to the sides of runways is kept deliberately clear in case of emergency landings and whatnot. Cluttering it with solar panels would probably be a no-go; imagine a plane crash-landing into the middle of a huge electrical installation not easily accessible for firefighters.
- Darkstack 7y ago
  I'm no expert in roads, airplanes, etc but a car weight 1/2 tons but i would not land an airplane (between 300 and 500 tons)onto something like a solar panels road, and for safety measure i think it's not optimal (fire, etc...) ?
PeterStuer 7y ago
Outcome perfectly predicted at the time. And no, you do not need to eat a dog feces sandwich to know it tastes bad.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Solar roads seem like a very expensive and thus fixed alternative, when we have a big enough expense ahead of us moving HVAC, transportation, manufacturing, etc. to green sources. Keeping solar generation separate is more flexible. It's also worth considering that we may choose to move away from big, expensive, fossil-based roadways to more compact, inexpensive and 'smart road' options.
crocal 7y ago
As a side note, falling leaves is one of the most dreaded problem in rail transportation. Not only does it obstruct things very efficiently, including the passage of light, but it also makes the rail surface very slippery, making it sometimes impossible for trains to actually brake using mechanical means. Much much worse than snow or rain. One sympathizes.
mavhc 7y ago
Pretty sure the only people who wanted solar roads were people who wanted roads and wanted to avoid protests from environmentalists. A road is only the 2nd worst place to put solar panels after a cave.
gbraad 7y ago
It is the dumbest idea to use a solar road when there are roofs; like bus shelters. train stations or even sound walls that can be converted. Cars would literally rip these roads apart due to dirt and grind. Even EENblog made several videos about this in the last few weeks. Just have a look: * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1233-the-demise-of-solar-roadways/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1233-the-demise-o... * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1234-more-epic-solar-roadways-fail/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1234-more-epic-so... * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/18/eevblog-1236-german-solar-freakin-roadways/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/18/eevblog-1236-german-solar...
lucid00 7y ago
I'm not sure I'd put "doesn't generate enough energy" in the failure category. It's a road. It normally doesn't generate energy anyway. Anything here is a plus, especially when it comes to research. They just have to take what they've learned from this and apply it to the next attempt. And from the sounds of it, the only thing they have to really focus on is ensure the next one lasts long enough to pay for its own construction. Solar sidewalks might be a better idea.
baud147258 7y ago
One could question (like the article did) the wisdom of building a PV project in Normandy, which has to be one of the rainiest and most cloud-covered area in France, unlike somewhere in the Southern half of the country, where the climate get a lot more sun year-round

214 points by prostoalex 7y ago

Anyone who bothered doing the math knew this was a horrible idea from the very start. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds

brian-armstrong 7y ago
For those who don't watch him, EEVBlog has had excellent videos on the feasibility of solar roadways.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  To summarize his videos: solar roadways were never feasible even in theory with quick back-of-the-envelope calculations and all of the known solar roadways projects in the world have failed or are nearing failure.

trilila 7y ago

“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 least before we call it a failure.

jcranmer 7y ago
> “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 Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so.
- trilila 7y ago
  Touche, a good point, but a first attempt is not usually reliable. I think we should learn more about what could be done different? Should instead all bike lanes be made of solar “panels” because the wights is all yet they would cover a large surface if they were to cover the whole city? How does a traveled road get covered in leaves?
- DC-3 7y ago
  > Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so. Your county council evidently uses better contractors than mine!
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    It's about the thickness laid down. The thicker, the longer it lasts, because thicker beds bend less than thinner ones, and so resist cracking better.
- dghughes 7y ago
  > Regular roads don't fall apart in 18 months, they take 18 years (or longer) to do so. More like 18 months in my region of the world.
GhostVII 7y ago
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 dirt and vehicles, and they can be angled towards the sun. Even in theory, I think solar roads are a failure.
- trilila 7y ago
  i stand corrected. But why not use them for bike lanes or parking lots indeed?
- blunte 7y ago
  I suspect the idea was partly that we already have to build infrastructure for roads; why not make the roads also a source of power? In practice it will take many iterations to reach a point where it makes sense. Or it simply may never make sense. The recent articles about some California farmlands being converted to solar fields does make sense. They were running out of water, but they had a lot of land to use for something. Even if solar roads can work, there's still the problem of relatively inefficient tranfer of power over long distances. It makes little sense to spend a lot of money to make a solar road that's far away from energy consumers since a lot of the energy produced by the road will be lost in transit.
- trilila 7y ago
  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.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    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.
dralley 7y ago
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.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
Road surfaces need the ability to flex while withstanding huge loads. Materials such as asphalt have this ability. Glass, in layers thick enough to support the loads necessary do not. Bitumen can also be patched and repaired relatively quickly and easily, and can use relatively simple machinery to repair/replace large sections at once. Solar panels require a lot more surface preparation, precision joining and when they break (because they will - accidents happen), leave dangerous road surfaces that cannot be easily patched/repaired. Solar Roadways won't work with our current state of technology where we need fixed rigid panels. Something that is either a replacement for bitumen, or can be mixed into it and is able to self-assemble a current pathway might be a viable option. But we're a long ways off doing anything like that.

remote_phone 7y ago

It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it. Hopefully something like this comes to fruition and we learn more and more with every iteration. Solar roads are a great idea. Maybe it means it needs daily sweeping with electric vacuum trucks or something but if it’s producing enough electricity then it’s worth it.

nordsieck 7y ago
> It was a failure but I’m glad they tried it. ... Solar roads are a great idea. It was a bad idea. Even in theory. The only positive thing about it is that it captured the imagination of lots of people who know nothing about solar or roads.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  The frustrating thing was that pretty every problem that arose during these trials were already known. Those who spoke up were ridiculed for being naysayers. There's a balance between those who reflexively oppose everything and those who have an informed opinion based on experience and knowledge. There was quite a bit of overlap between those who strongly supported solar roadways and the "I f*ing love science!" crowd that have turned science into something indistinguishable from magic. The original installation in Idaho ran into predictable problems almost immediately. The much larger installations had very little justification for going forward other than it was very popular with a rather vocal group of voters. Doubt any of the politicians, celebrities, or their fans who pushed this and dumped all over those with credible objections will apologize for their part in the boondoggle.
- Endy 7y ago
  I'm of two minds about what you're saying. On the one hand, it looked like a bold failure from the start. On the other hand, it put the idea of solar generation in "unorthodox" places into the minds of normal people and city planners alike. Solar roads aren't the way to go - but how many people, having heard about the project, encouraged their city to put up solar panels on all the light & phone poles? How many people have taken the enthusiasm from this project and looked to see where they could safely generate power from secondary sources in their own lives? So it's a great idea, and it's also a massive and fairly obvious failure at the same time. The message to take away from this isn't just "solar roads were a bad idea". It's that "solar roads are a bad idea, but we should keep looking at other ways to safely generate the energy we need around roads and urban passages."

cryptoz 7y ago

Why wasn't that strip of land right by the road converted into a solar strip instead? It looks like that shoulder has almost as much physical area to it and would take a lot less wear and tear. I never understood this idea to begin with.

close04 7y ago
I think the idea was to take advantage of land that cannot be used otherwise.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Most roads are in rural areas with plenty of room next to them. The inventors were very aware of this, being from Sandpoint, Idaho.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

This 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-turned-out-colossal-failure-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-first-solar-road-turn...

close04 7y ago
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.
- Athas 7y ago
  That sounds like a good idea. It would also give cities more incentive to keep the like lanes well maintained (even in bike-friendly cities, bike lanes are usually less well maintained than motorways). One problem is that bike lanes are often located close to shade-providing buildings or vegetation.
  - kaybe 7y ago
    How great would it be to have a roof of solar cells above the city's bike paths. No problems with precipitation or sun and less maintenance.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  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.
  - close04 7y ago
    This seems like a massive undertaking given that those panels would sit atop fast moving traffic and stand up to the elements (like tons of snow). But I'm sure at some point it will be perfectly feasible.

buboard 7y ago

Help me understand the logic behind taking a PV and stepping on it in the worst possible way, leaving dirt , rubber etc, when every PV that is exposed only to the open air needs regular cleaning / maintainance. And its being frequently under the shade of cars

doteka 7y ago
I'm curious how you arrived at that conclusion? Common wisdom, at least a few years ago, was "cleaning isn't worth it". (https://phys.org/news/2013-07-solar-panels-worth.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-solar-panels-worth.html)
- rbongers 7y ago
  This is for rooftop panels though. Having regular activity on top of something is, I would assume, very different than just letting it sit.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Self-cleaning glass is a fairly mature technology and will work effectively on a rooftop solar installation. That won't work on a solar roadway, which a) needs a textured surface to provide adequate grip for vehicles and b) can't retain any sort of coating due to friction and c) is constantly being covered in axle grease, tire rubber, brake dust and the innards of various wild animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_glass
- imtringued 7y ago
  The article starts with the wrong assumption that you have to hire people to clean the solar panels. Robots have taken over that job a long time ago, at least for utility scale solar.
rbongers 7y ago
There is no logic behind it, only blind idealism. Unfortunately the couple who invented solar roads poured a lot of time and money into this idea and couldn't back down. Many people followed their enthusiasm. I think one of the most difficult things you can do as a person is to be honest with yourself and admit when something has failed or won't work and to abandon it, but stories like this are reminders to really self reflect.

_Nat_ 7y ago

Solar roads seem like a really cool technology. Like, if they worked great and were affordable and everything, then awesome! But, practically speaking, they seem to violate the [single responsibility principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_responsibility_principl...). By coupling a solar panel to a road, we're forcing the physical entity to comply with competing objectives. Seems like the future's prone to be different, anyway. For example, how long are we going to really need roads that're driven over at-random like today? Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels.

sigstoat 7y ago
> Seems like self-driving cars could be designed-and-programmed to drive over just specific parts of the road meant to handle their weight, while the gaps between those load-bearing parts can have solar panels. if you can drive that precisely, why even put anything in the gaps?
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  Same reason we have safety rails around roads. Plus, if we want solar roads, solar power would be a perk. I mean, once the road is dominated by self-driving cars, presumably we can implement new driving requirements beyond what human drivers could implement. For roads, we might want cars to drive over load-bearing parts, if that's optimal. Or if it's more efficient to have the wear-and-tear distributed, then cars can drive in staggered formations, much like a wear-leveling strategy in solid-state drives (SSD's). But, there's no reason to design a transportation system around the premise that self-driving cars can't control their patterns just because human-driven cars couldn't. Which isn't to say that we should assume that self-driving cars will be perfect or infallible, just that we can assume best-effort strategies. For example, we shouldn't assume that self-driving cars would never drive over a gap with a solar panel, but we can design a system in which self-driving cars try to avoid driving over the solar panels.
kolinko 7y ago

inflatableDodo 7y ago

As was foretold. This is all very, very simple. Solar panels above heavy vehicle traffic: Good Idea. Solar panels below heavy vehicle traffic: Bad Idea. If you want to solar panel anything more heavy duty than a bike path, make a roof.

blunte 7y ago

Fortunately 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.

magicalhippo 7y ago
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM50P4K9UVk [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ngWjH0jdRo
- blunte 7y ago
  Sure, I tend to agree with you. But as I posted to another reply, it's conceivable that this silly experiment will lead to improvement in material science or some other construction/manufacturing practice related to solar panels. And hey, we can't be too hard on them for perhaps jumping on a bandwagon. Solar roads seems more plausible than food delivery service on "the blockchain".
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    The only thing that they could have contributed with is making flexible solar panels. But they didn't. Instead they just put down regular panels. Assume they actually made flexible panels. They'd still have the issue of the abysmal efficiency due to the inevitable grinding of the surface and dirt filling up the cracks. You'd need frequent washing of the roads to keep them clean. Was that included in the energy projections?

namdnay 7y ago

The silliest thing about this road is that France already has very low carbon electricity, only 7.2% of electricity produced in 2018 was from fossil fuels...

dghughes 7y ago

Most solar panels are very inefficient at converting the sun to electricity so they need all the help they can get. Two things solar panels require is to be clean and to be perpendicular to the sun. A solar road achieves neither of those things.

avip 7y ago
They also need to keep cool, another thing being under many running cars is not ideal for.
onion2k 7y ago
Those things are necessary to get the opimimum amount of electricity but the point of solar roads is to sacrifice some efficiency for the benefit of having huge amounts of surface area. The amount of paved highway in developed countries is enormous, so even massively inefficient solar roads could supply all the electricity necessary and more.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Could you talk more concretely? What is the back of the napkin calculation for total power if some percent of all highways were solar?
  - panopticon 7y ago
    Not OP, but I was curious: Let's assume a good solar panel yields 15 watts per square foot under direct sunlight. The DOT estimates about 1.5 million acres of interstate in the US. Without getting too complicated, let's assume we produce at our ideal wattage for 3 hours a day. Given our ideal solar panel, this is 2.94 billion kWh per day. Getting ideal conditions on a highway surface is unrealistic, so let's assume our fictional extremely rugged solar panel can only yield 0.25 watts per square foot. Now we're sitting at 49.01 million kWh per day. To put this into perspective, the US produces roughly 11.45 billion kWh per day. So turning all of our interstates into inefficient solar panels covers less than a half a percent of our energy production. Caveat: this is shitty napkin math and omits all other paved surfaces in the US of which I'm sure non-federal roads and parking lots make up a lot of, but I couldn't find good sources for those.

hmd_imputer 7y ago

Solar Freaking Roadways! Do you guys remember this viral youtube viral video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU

celeritascelery 7y ago
When I first saw that video I thought, “this has to be a joke right? They can’t actually think that is feasible.” And here we are…
- hmd_imputer 7y ago
  The video attracted so much undeserved attention that many engineers felt that they had to produce a corresponding debunk video explaining why it is such a useless idea and why asphalt is currently our best option on building roads.

mynameishere 7y ago

They 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?

api 7y ago

Why would this even be tried? It's an obviously terrible idea for lots of reasons.

WalterBright 7y ago

"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.

tootie 7y ago
I find it hard to believe they were really unaware. They either overestimated the durability of their devices or were running a quasi scam.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  political stunt wasting funds.. someone clueless decided or was lobbied to pick this thing.
  - degenerate 7y ago
    This + quasi-scam. There's a lot of money to be made in the "going green" space and if lying about your product gets you the contract, only the government (citizens) lose and you laugh all the way to the bank. I wish more government contracts had forced warranty / refund clauses (whatever those are called).
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      You could put those clauses in but the legal entity would simply go bankrupt. You'd need something to go after the principals to make this stick.
      - egdod 7y ago
        Fraud might suffice.
- ergothus 7y ago
  I know nothing of the details here, so this is total speculation, but I can imagine value in going with a solution you know wont "succeed", if the data you get from the failure is valuable. Like, no need to spend money trying to fix the tractor problem if the leaf problem is too severe. If in practice the leaf problem only deteriorates things by 30%, that's different than 80%, etc. Spending the money to solve problems on your first run is likely to not actually solve all of them. Then again, this could be a bold exercise in fraud and/or incompetence.

doteka 7y ago

I 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.

Mirioron 7y ago
If they had admitted failure earlier, then they couldn't milk as much money from suckers.
rasz 7y ago
What failure? They got paid handsomely.

phtrivier 7y ago

I can't imagine how hard it must have been, in France of all places, to try something that bold and risky and obvious to oppose beforehand. We're the country of ruthless self deprecation coupled with perfectionist universalism. I hope something was learnt here (other than learning not to do it again), and I'm absolutely confident the people who cluelessly pushed for it will go on their public careers unaffected while the innocents are punished. We've done more insane stuff and survived to tell the tale. But really, PV in Normandy ? Come oooooon....

api 7y ago
> We're the country of ruthless self deprecation coupled with perfectionist universalism. I wonder if there traits make you good at nuclear power. Perfectionism and ruthless self criticism seem like they'd engender the kind of thorough and methodological approach that keeps reactors from getting explody. The Russian "can't duck it, fuck it" attitude seems to have the opposite effect judging from the Geiger counter readings.
jdietrich 7y ago
>I hope something was learnt here (other than learning not to do it again) I'm afraid not - the trials played out exactly as the naysayers predicted. Most of the panels cracked under load and failed due to water ingress; those that didn't became woefully inefficient due to soiling. They were dangerously slippery even in ideal conditions, they cost much more than a conventional rooftop installation and they never generated as much electricity as a rooftop installation even when they were brand new. The whole exercise was a complete waste of time and money.
rasz 7y ago
French arent afraid to be weird. Let me introduce you to Renault Twizy - a road legal mobility scooter, and Avantime - the only coupe minivan even made, a 2 door with no B-pillars, sold as good as that description sounds.

meerita 7y ago

I think the best for societies is solar roofs. Much better surface availability. Solar roads, filled with thousands of cars cannot suck energy from sun so well as houses' roofs.

userbinator 7y ago

French officials said the road, made of photovoltaic panels, would generate electricity to power streetlights in Tourouvre, a local town. I don't know how reliable they are, but solar-powered streetlights are already common in some areas --- and being mounted high above on the lights themselves, the panels are far less likely to be damaged.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Wonder if that would also help reduce light pollution if the panel was wide enough compared to the lens over the light.

Smithalicious 7y ago

I never managed to see the advantages of having a solar road compared to just having a normal road with solar panels next to it. Or above it. Or literally anywhere else. In fact I can't think of many areas that still get direct sunlight that would make for a worse place to put solar panels than on the road...

spodek 7y ago
> Colas, the company that built the road, said in 2016 that the solar panels were covered with resin containing sheets of silicon to make them capable of withstanding all traffic. I'm going to bet they said that after the check cleared.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Considering how public bidding work here, they said that before the check was written, with everything that was necessary for winning the bid.
Someone 7y ago
I have serious doubts these experiments will lead to commercially successful implementations, but I don’t think it is useless to do them. Reason? Solar cells keep getting cheaper and cheaper. That makes the costs of scaffolding to hold the cells take a larger and larger share of installation costs. In the limit where cells are essentially free, putting cells everywhere there is some large horizontal area will make sense. Now, of course, we may not get close enough to that limit for this to make sense, cells may be too fragile for mounting in a road, there may be plenty of more profitable places to put solar cells, etc, etc, but that isn’t guaranteed, and we can’t tell without experimenting.
- Retric 7y ago
  Except we don't actually need that much solar power and ground based installation is really cheap. Further road surfaces need to be transparent for solar to work, handle high loads, channel water off the surface, and provide lots of friction in a wide rang of weather conditions. It’s an extremely difficult problem, but solving it without massive reduction in panel costs is kind of pointless.

nullwasamistake 7y ago

This was a PR stunt from the beginning. We can't even make roads last 20 years with the most durable materials we can find. We make them out of rock and they still fall apart. Car windshields are scratched to hell after a decade. Grocery checkout scanner windows are made of Sapphire, nearly as hard as diamond, and still need to be replaced. Solar roads will never be a reality. Optically clear material hard and malleable enough seem a physical impossibly. Metals are the only suitable material and they cannot be made transparent due to hard physical constraints.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Lets test in production!

Erudite_Genius 7y ago

Solar roadways failed for the same reason Tesla will NEVER outsell gasoline cars: bad technology that's orders of magnitude worse than existing solutions. That being said, a huge leap forward in technology would make BOTH viable. A better road-based electricity generation plan would have been to use piezoelectric panels instead of photovoltaic ones.

Endy 7y ago

You know, I always wondered why they didn't go for solar covered sidewalks, which would provide shade to pedestrians and power to everything that needs it. Roads seem like a better place for pressure-based generation (of anything, frankly). Still, just for the enthusiasm they garnered and the continued push toward making renewable energy generation interact with the everyday, the idealists should be commended. The engineers... not as such, no. But, silly question, knowing very little about this field, couldn't it be possible to (co)generate power from the heat and pressure that roads endure on a near-constant basis?

nullwasamistake 7y ago
Solar roads and sidewalks are a PR stunt. Abrasion is no joke, nothing optically transparent survives on the ground. You can see this easily in the cellar "pavement lights" common in NYC and other old cities. Light still passes through after a century, but maybe 20% and very diffuse. Bad for solar panels. Roads don't absorb enough energy to generate power, they're not flexible enough. They're designed to not absorb energy since it hastens breakdown. Potholes are a good example of a road surface energy absorber :) . Solar roofs are a far better bet. Elon is onto something there, but time will tell if costs can be brought down enough. Besides the good PR, solar roofs substantially reduce heat absorbtion, important in the sunny climates solar works well in. And we have a ton of wasted roof space. Many companies would willingly allow roof panels to be put up for free if the economics for power generation were good enough.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I think you misunderstood the parent, they said "solar covered sidewalks" that shade pedestrians, so roofs. Solar roofs on car parks seem good to me; better than using pasture land converted to solar farms which I'm seeing more and more in UK.
  - nullwasamistake 7y ago
    Somewhat. OP also mentions generating energy from the pavement, which I don't think will ever be reasonable. Solar car park covers are a great idea. Easier access than roofs, don't need to be water proof. Good cooling airflow underneath. Tend to be close to cities where power is easier to transport. Solar parking lot covers are the best ROI solar installations I can imagine. Surprised Telsa isn't doing this with their SuperCharger stations

atoav 7y ago

Solar roads are a prototypical example of an idea that looks/sounds cool to regular people, but is in fact totally useless. Why not just build a solar ceilling?

debatem1 7y ago

Seems like you'd be much better off floating them on a lake. There was a project a few years ago to do this both for power and to reduce evaporative loss in reservoirs, but I don't know if anything has come of it.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Wouldn't you kill the lake, unless you only covered a small proportion of it.
- pacala 7y ago
  Depends on the lake. There is a reservoir near LA covered in millions of black balls. Apparently this is a side effect of water quality regulation, direct sunlight triggers a chemical reaction that produces harmful byproducts. As a bonus, evaporation is also reduced, which matters in semi-arid climates like Southern California. https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2019/5/23/why-are-96000000-black-balls-on-this-reservoir https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2019/5/23/why-are-96000000...
  - Endy 7y ago
    If direct sunlight triggers a harmful reaction in your water, you need to reconsider what's in your water.
    - dumbfoundded 7y ago
      Not really. Bromide and chlorine are okay for humans to consume. Sunlight turns these into to bromate which is a carcinogen. https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-with-those-black-balls-in-the-la-reservoir https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-w...
      - Endy 7y ago
        Okay, but do bromide and chlorine naturally occur in the water in that area? Or was it because of human meddling?

duxup 7y ago

Solar panels and roads have different properties for all sorts of good reasons. Why people want to compromise both is beyond me.

gonational 7y ago

The fact an idea this stupid was actually implemented is fucking mind-blowing. But, we should all be paying “carbon taxes” so that these same idiots can save the world.

nkoren 7y ago

Yes, solar roads were always the answer to the question of "where is the absolute worst possible place to put solar panels". This was 100% predictable.

Animats 7y ago
Could be worse.[1] Remember the schemes for recovering energy from traffic on sidewalks and roads? Pavegen pivoted to collecting info about people walking on their sidewalks, rather than energy. [1] https://pavegen.com/ https://pavegen.com/
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Talk about ethical whiplash. I feel especially bad for any engineers that joined to make the world a better place then found out they would be designing tracking systems...
  - en-us 7y ago
    Yeah it sure would be awful if that happened to anyone. Imagine joining a company that claims to help the world and instead you design unbelievable tracking and surveillance systems. Ha ha. Ha. sobs
    - madamelic 7y ago
      Yeah, like welcome to tech.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  >Pavegen pivoted to collecting info about people walking on their sidewalks, rather than energy. Wow. Switching from saving the world, to spying on everybody in it. That's almost a perfect microcosm of how the tech industry seems to have morphed in the last decade.
  - jacquesm 7y ago

ben509 7y ago

> The French minister for energy said she wanted to have solar panels on one mile of road every 621 miles in the country within the next five years. You can still do that! Just put them on a rail off to the side, angled to get lots of sunlight.

ctulek 7y ago

This is not a fiasco, it is progress! I am sure they learned a lot. This is how science and engineering works. We keep forgetting that. Next time, I am sure they will do better.

bittercynic 7y ago
It is a fiasco in the sense that it didn't work as advertised, or anywhere close.

jwr 7y ago

For some reason, solar roads are a very aggressive meme (in the classical sense of the word). They capture the imagination and blind people to engineering reality. Solar roads do not make any sense whatsoever, as you wrote pretty much any other place is better for panels.

einpoklum 7y ago
How so? I mean, it's an image of cars driving over something which is kind of delicate. Perhaps you mean roads with solar panels near them that feed the passing cars energy? Now that at least sounds exciting! (Although it's probably not a great idea either, not enough battery weight saving to be worth it.)
SllX 7y ago
They capture the imagination because there are plenty of places you don’t want to build solar panels. Namely places that you want to leave alone for ecological or recreational purposes. If you can take a piece of infrastructure that is pervasive throughout a built environment and give it additional purpose, then you can save on or reduce the land you specify for this purpose. Does it work? Apparently not, or at least: not yet. We have not successfully accomplished this, but it remains to be seen if this is a case of not yet, or never will. Experimentation yields useful data, even when the experiment is a failure. So where were the failures? The road was less durable than expected. They didn’t account for falling leaves. They didn’t produce as much electricity as they thought it would. Thunderstorms also damaged the road. But! It did produce a decent amount of electricity, it did successfully transmit it, and it did function as a road. Colas has given up and chose not to pursue this route anymore, but it isn’t a death sentence for the idea in its entirety. It is a failure of execution, and there will be a lot of failures before there is ever a success. I’ll end this with the caveat that there might not ever be a success, but it is too early to decide that and further experimentation might yield other interesting road construction technologies.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  It's not an experiment that can yield anything or teach us anything if there is no paper and no data. A fraudulent startup maybe.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

haha. The French are dumb

jostmey 7y ago

When I walk through a forest, it is full of life. There are dozens to hundreds of critters living above and below me everywhere I walk. When I walk through developed areas, it is lifeless pavement. Anything that reduces humanities footprint, leaving more land to Nature, is probably a good thing. I hope people don't give up on solar paneled roads.

gbrown 7y ago
If solar panel roads cause more waste and carbon emissions, while supplying less actual power, I certainly hope we give up on them. The ecological calculation requires science and engineering, not vague feelings about what's probably good.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

einpoklum 7y ago

It was "unprecedented" in 2016 mostly because it was kind of a sketchy idea. I mean, the road will get car-exhaust-sediment on it, like any other road; and all sorts of mechanical trauma. Roads wear down, after all, one way or another. Why have panels on the roads? Is there no land available in France?

tempsolution 7y ago

Well, that's hilarious. A solar-panel road. As if obtaining power efficiently from solar energy wasn't difficult enough. No you have to also build it into a road, which is also completely useless, even if it worked. We don't have a space problem. It's not like you couldn't place these things somewhere else...

aniijbod 7y ago

Does anyone but me have the suspicion that the animosity towards solar roads was something to do with a 'nerve being touched', some kind of 'triggering'? Sure, they might not work out, but lots of stupid-sounding ideas ('a horseless carriage? Whatever next?') have turned out to work, just as much as lots of somewhat futuristic but nonetheless sensible sounding ideas have turned out not to be here yet ('flying cars are just around the corner'). Who knows, at some point in the future, with different technologies and materials, different efficiencies and performance, we might indeed find solar energy being collected from roads. Just as we are laughing right now at the current, ludicrously oversold and patently unsuccessful efforts, future generations may be laughing at our arrogant dismissal of an idea that might ultimately have just turned out to have been ahead of its time. Let's applaud the audacity of the solar roadways hubris in the spirit of uninhibited innovative endeavour, just as much as we pat ourselves on the back for having successfully spotted its obvious shortcomings and predicted its seemingly inevitable struggle for survival.

teawrecks 7y ago
Yeah I don't know why the article is so negative. Any engineer would look at this and say, "cool, a few more problems to solve" not "well golly, I guess there's nothing we can do about a few leaves".
- red75prime 7y ago
  Like placing the panels above roads, for example. It helps to get optimal inclination of panels too, and reduce stress levels, and eliminates losses from cars' shadows, and simplifies maintenance, and reduces pavement costs. Some ideas are just plain stupid.
Mirioron 7y ago
>Sure, they might not work out, but lots of stupid-sounding ideas ('a horseless carriage? It's a monumentally stupid idea. I'm surprised it isn't outright labelled as a scam. They basically cheated money out of governments and gullible people with a project that was never a good idea in the first place. Solar is the perpetuum mobile of our time.

mettamage 7y ago

Hmm... Can we just applaud that people are trying something new? Or are we going to shoot it down because of pessimism? If you know so well what works, then do your best and make it happen or write a guide on how to do experiments that almost always lead to success. They didn’t fail fast, but they failed with relatively little costs. What is 5 million to the national GDP of France? It seems to me they were trying something new, were brave and paid the price. In most cases you get nothing back.

thaumaturgy 7y ago
Yeah, this is how I see it too. It was an experiment. It failed. Things were learned from deploying it into a real-world environment. This may contribute in some way to a future technology, as often happens. HN of course is full of people who are experts on every topic, so naturally there was no need to actually perform this experiment. They could have just accurately predicted its faults and performance from theorizing alone after reading just a few articles about materials science and the properties of modern roads. While we're busy talking about the obvious and predictable failure of this experiment, we should also take a moment to also revisit the obvious and predictable failure that was Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Unlike in dropbox case, this is something people with engineering degrees that often include physics and material sciences can actually calculate.
- roar-of-time 7y ago
  The comments on that page are overwhelmingly friendly. And regardless, how can you even compare the two?! Dropbox fulfilled an obvious need and fulfilled it very well, whereas "solar roads" don't seem to be a solution to any problem at all!
- DanBC 7y ago
  > Things were learned from deploying it into a real-world environment. Nothing was learned.

jacquesm 7y ago

If anybody is disappointed here then they have only themselves to blame. This was dead obvious to anybody with half a working brain and a basic idea of the concepts of road construction, photo-voltaics and general power infrastructure. Doomed to fail and should not have passed the first phase of review for feasibility. Many of the projects that have not seen the light of day are in that state because they were dumb, not because nobody thought of them before.

ijiiijji1 7y ago

Thunderf00t says Solar frickin' failure. Maybe solar tracking panels above parking lots would be better, and there's zillions of Walmarts with enormous parking areas the size of some airports that could co-locate solar farms.

dredmorbius 7y ago

There is one and only one bright spot I can see in this test: the concept was trialed under ideal conditions according to its proponents, and failed spectacularly. There's a high probability that true beleivers still won't be convinced -- their faith transcends reason and experience. The rest of us can point to this as a Provably Bad Idea. My only regret is that there aren't similarly conclusive demonstrations possible in all such cases.

RyJones 7y ago
http://www.whenprophecyfails.info/Conditions.htm http://www.whenprophecyfails.info/Conditions.htm
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Interesting, though I think there's more to it than just this. Belief tends to become identity. Moreover, belief becomes an ordering principle. The refutation of a belief creates the problem that there is no longer an ordering principle. This isn't always clearly obvious, but if the belief is itself part of a complex chain of interconnected beliefs, then removal of one, even if quite clearly false, creates discord within the entire structure. You've got to break down and rebuild the whole thing, which can get complicated. (Compare, by way of technical analogue, the task of refactoring a particularly messy bit of code or kit, where it turns out that a specific feature has interactions across a wide number of other areas.) The Kubler-Ross model of grief is, I'm increasingly convinced, actually a response to belief changes. The original research was based on patients informed of their own pending mortality, by way of fatal diagnoses or conditions, and how they responded. Such information is a massive disruption to belief systems. And absent some mechanism for supporting transition to a different one, the classic KR response (denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance) is highly probable. The interesting question to me is what happens in cases where such responses don't develop. Where we can and do change beliefs quickly and fluidly. What do those circumstances have in common.

caymanjim 7y ago

This was not at all a failure. They built a 1km experimental road. They gained valuable information about real-world performance and technical challenges. It's not as though they built a 100km long six-lane highway with unproven technology. They built a tiny one-lane trial to test a promising idea. It was overhyped by politicians, but what isn't? Maybe they even steamrolled over engineering red flags. That doesn't mean it wasn't a valuable experiment.

holmberd 7y ago
Exactly, failure or not is a good thing, moving on.
duck2 7y ago
If you can deduce something from your current knowledge, you don't need to do an experiment for that. Certainly people knew that putting fragile semiconductors under roads isn't the best idea, but they went on and spent time and money. I would call this a waste.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Some people deduced one thing, and others deduced the other thing. There was plenty of excitement about this idea on this very site when it was first proposed. Seeing something once is better than hearing it a hundred times.
  - thereisnospork 7y ago
    > There was plenty of excitement The point is there shouldn't have been. Some people deduced and others hoped or willed themselves to ignorance.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    only because reasonable opinion were downvoted to hell from the easily excitable crowd. I distinctly remember because I was amongst the downvoted, and dirt/rubber was one of the common concern, and it's weird to read in the article "engineers didn't think about the leaves" like, randos on internet could tell you that, what kind of cheap ass engineers were involved in the design and feasibility phase?

higherkinded 7y ago

Who would've guessed? Getting a kilometer of solar panels installed as a road (sic!) in a region that has a cloudy skies most of the time. It's borderline genius. How did it get any approval at all? Who treated solar panels being used as a road (probably to spend some more tax money on casing?) as a good idea? How is it not just obvious that it will not even get close to the easier and cheaper (rooftop panels) options? This imitation of environment care is so hilarious that I don't have the proper words to describe it.

freediver 7y ago

Lets not forget that the first electric car was also a disappointing failure.

egdod 7y ago
The first X was a failure for many good ideas X. But that does not mean that every (or even most) failures are just bugs being worked out of good ideas. Sometimes a failure is just a bad idea.
- freediver 7y ago
  That was entirely my point.
  - egdod 7y ago
    Was it? It seemed like the opposite of your point.

rdiddly 7y ago

This was obviously never going to work; I think it's far more interesting as a piece of morality theater and/or a psychological ink-blot test. Because who looks at a system like this (individual humans carted around extravagantly in an energy-intensive, 4,000-pound CO2-belching murder machine, on an expensive and space-intensive road created just for them) and thinks, you know what's wrong with this system? It doesn't generate enough energy. Mmm yeah, you're almost right. Sort of like how a violent person doesn't generate enough not-punching-people. Keep going with that reasoning. See if you can use the phrase "in the first place" in your answer. It's fascinating. Obviously they seem to grasp the system has something wrong with it, and the problem has something to do with energy. But when that line of thought begins to lead them inexorably toward the conclusion that they should actually probably stop driving immediately, like today, they take a quick left turn into something else, anything else, whatever's available and "green" - SOLAR, let's do the solar. That'll absolve our sins. Hence, where do you place the panels? In the road, where the sin occurred. It's like the dim awareness of our actual transportation/energy predicament, is in the cellar of their subconscious, knocking at the door to enter conscious awareness, but not quite managing to get the person's attention. The mental contortions required to actually like this idea, remind me a lot of the ones required to maintain various states of denial. The fact being desperately avoided of course is that a set of changes far more sweeping and less pleasant than they're willing to admit or allow, are going to be necessary.

fencepost 7y ago
This was obviously never going to work Could be, and I suspect that a lot of the actual engineering folks involved would agree 100% on this point. They'd probably also tell you that 5 million for real - world experimental data on the exact ways in which it failed was very much worth it. Was there anything else worth responding to in the wordy pseudo-psychological insults?
- Atheros 7y ago
  May I please read the real-world experimental data that will save other companies millions of dollars?

m3at 7y ago

If you can cope with the swearing, this is an interesting debunking of an other (US) solar road project with preposterous claims: [1] [1] https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-reasons-solar-roadways-are-fucking-stupid/ https://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2016/07/18/4-rea...

mmmBacon 7y ago

There was a fairly ridiculous promotional video going around YouTube circa 2014 about a couple who “invented” solar roadways. I’ve placed a link here for your amusement. https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU

torpfactory 7y ago

The only thing roads have going for them as a location for solar is that we (humans) have a lot of road area to work with. Wouldn’t it be great if roads did double duty supporting our tires AND making some energy? I’ve always wondered if there were some way to use the space above (as in you drive under them) the roads instead. Is there a mass-efficient-enough design to make putting panels above the road a profitable thing.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

Why aren't sidewalks being turned in to solar sidewalks? I wondered how robust solar roads could be given that even concrete roads fall apart when you have thousands of cars driving on them. But solar sidewalks, that could work.

kirrent 7y ago
It's been done with bike paths. Also got a terrible track record with a lot of failures.

Grue3 7y ago

Made me think, what roads would actually be suitable for this? They have to be: 1) cleaned often 2) have very little traffic 3) have a very large surface And one of the solutions that pops up is: airport runways! They have a huge area, way larger than necessary to land a plane. The surface is always kept in good condition. The traffic is minimal, except for a few very busy airports. Some airports handle just a few planes a day, the rest of the time they stay unused, when they could've been producing energy instead.

jcrawfordor 7y ago
guess what surface area also meets this criteria: dedicated solar installations on open land. and you don't even need to disrupt airport operations for the duration of operations.
absk 7y ago
Why does it have to be roads? All airports have more than enough free space as it is, which can be used to set up solar panels in the most optimal way.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I expect that a lot of that seemingly free space to the sides of runways is kept deliberately clear in case of emergency landings and whatnot. Cluttering it with solar panels would probably be a no-go; imagine a plane crash-landing into the middle of a huge electrical installation not easily accessible for firefighters.
Darkstack 7y ago
I'm no expert in roads, airplanes, etc but a car weight 1/2 tons but i would not land an airplane (between 300 and 500 tons)onto something like a solar panels road, and for safety measure i think it's not optimal (fire, etc...) ?

PeterStuer 7y ago

Outcome perfectly predicted at the time. And no, you do not need to eat a dog feces sandwich to know it tastes bad.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Solar roads seem like a very expensive and thus fixed alternative, when we have a big enough expense ahead of us moving HVAC, transportation, manufacturing, etc. to green sources. Keeping solar generation separate is more flexible. It's also worth considering that we may choose to move away from big, expensive, fossil-based roadways to more compact, inexpensive and 'smart road' options.

crocal 7y ago

As a side note, falling leaves is one of the most dreaded problem in rail transportation. Not only does it obstruct things very efficiently, including the passage of light, but it also makes the rail surface very slippery, making it sometimes impossible for trains to actually brake using mechanical means. Much much worse than snow or rain. One sympathizes.

mavhc 7y ago

Pretty sure the only people who wanted solar roads were people who wanted roads and wanted to avoid protests from environmentalists. A road is only the 2nd worst place to put solar panels after a cave.

gbraad 7y ago

It is the dumbest idea to use a solar road when there are roofs; like bus shelters. train stations or even sound walls that can be converted. Cars would literally rip these roads apart due to dirt and grind. Even EENblog made several videos about this in the last few weeks. Just have a look: * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1233-the-demise-of-solar-roadways/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1233-the-demise-o... * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1234-more-epic-solar-roadways-fail/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/07/eevblog-1234-more-epic-so... * https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/18/eevblog-1236-german-solar-freakin-roadways/ https://www.eevblog.com/2019/08/18/eevblog-1236-german-solar...

lucid00 7y ago

I'm not sure I'd put "doesn't generate enough energy" in the failure category. It's a road. It normally doesn't generate energy anyway. Anything here is a plus, especially when it comes to research. They just have to take what they've learned from this and apply it to the next attempt. And from the sounds of it, the only thing they have to really focus on is ensure the next one lasts long enough to pay for its own construction. Solar sidewalks might be a better idea.

baud147258 7y ago

One could question (like the article did) the wisdom of building a PV project in Normandy, which has to be one of the rainiest and most cloud-covered area in France, unlike somewhere in the Southern half of the country, where the climate get a lot more sun year-round