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But anyone who has read a book about designing a home solar system can tell you that all of the literature tells you that you have to pick the location of your

But anyone who has read a book about designing a home solar system can tell you that all of the literature tells you that you have to pick the location of your panels carefully so they aren't occluded by trees over part of the year because the power losses due to occlusion are significant and can make a system non-viable and non-economic. From the book I read [0] (although mine is the 2015 edition), not planning for obstacles is the #1 reason solar power system designs fail. I'm not sure why they didn't hire an experienced engineer for this multi-million Euro project. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Electricity-Handbook-installing-photovoltaic/dp/1907670718 https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Electricity-Handbook-installing...

pgeorgi 7y ago
> because the power losses due to occlusion are significant and can make a system non-viable and non-economic That depends on how large the individual cells are and how they're wired up. There are panels that have a pass-through if they're occluded too much to avoid them limiting the output of other cells. It's possible that these panels had compensation mechanisms built-in. > I'm not sure why they didn't hire an experienced engineer for this multi-million Euro project. This isn't a few amateurs getting a construction grant and slapping the cheapest off-the-shelf panels they could find onto the pavement. The panels were built by a French company called Wattway, a subsidiary of Colas, a large French street construction corporation. The parent company also did the construction work of actually putting these things on the street. Apparently the "Institut National de l'Energie Solaire" was involved in this project as well, which is a public research facility (co-run by a university and the CEA, which has a budget of more than 5 billion Euros, and has a staff of 19k employees and 1200 grad + post-grad students). That "solar road" might have been part of a research grant for all kinds of PV developments and they had to deliver it as a demonstration. That would also explain to me why they give up so easily. From the article: "Wattway [...] told Le Monde that it would not be going to market."

pgeorgi 7y ago

> because the power losses due to occlusion are significant and can make a system non-viable and non-economic That depends on how large the individual cells are and how they're wired up. There are panels that have a pass-through if they're occluded too much to avoid them limiting the output of other cells. It's possible that these panels had compensation mechanisms built-in. > I'm not sure why they didn't hire an experienced engineer for this multi-million Euro project. This isn't a few amateurs getting a construction grant and slapping the cheapest off-the-shelf panels they could find onto the pavement. The panels were built by a French company called Wattway, a subsidiary of Colas, a large French street construction corporation. The parent company also did the construction work of actually putting these things on the street. Apparently the "Institut National de l'Energie Solaire" was involved in this project as well, which is a public research facility (co-run by a university and the CEA, which has a budget of more than 5 billion Euros, and has a staff of 19k employees and 1200 grad + post-grad students). That "solar road" might have been part of a research grant for all kinds of PV developments and they had to deliver it as a demonstration. That would also explain to me why they give up so easily. From the article: "Wattway [...] told Le Monde that it would not be going to market."