France unveils the world’s first (and probably last) solar panel road
By Paul Homewood
Tallbloke has this story about a solar panel road, which had me reaching for the calendar to check it was not April 1st!
Five million Euros to power a few street lights sounds expensive. What effect traffic has on the panels remains to be seen, but dirt could be an issue.
A solar panel road, claimed to be the world’s first, has opened in France, reports the Daily Mail Online:
The 0.6 miles (1km) stretch of road in the small Normandy village of Tourouvre-au-Perche is paved with 2,880 solar panels, which convert energy from the sun into electricity. It is hoped that the the road could eventually provide enough energy to power the small village’s street lights.
The ‘Wattway’ road features 2,800 sq m (9,186 sq ft) of panels and was showcased today at an inauguration ceremony attended by French minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy Ségolène Royal.
The road is expected to produce 280 MWh of electricity a year.
While the daily production will fluctuate according to weather and seasons, it is expected to reach 767 kWh per day, with peaks up to 1,500 kWh per day in summer.
Some 2,000 motorists will use the RD5 road every day during a two-year test period.
During that time, assessments will be made as to whether the road is capable of generating enough power to run the village’s street lights. Tourouvre-au-Perchef is home to around 3,400 residents.
The project is said to have cost €5m (£4.2m/$5.1) and was financed by the French government.
A solar panel road, claimed to be the world’s first, has opened in France. The 1km (0.6-mile) stretch of road in the small Normandy village of Tourouvre-au-Perche is paved with 2,880 photovoltaic panels
There are a number of problems with this project, not least the fact that you don’t actually need street lights when the sun is shining!
And I hate to think what might happen to the panels when a car decides to pull off to the side of the road.
But let’s actually look more closely at the numbers.
If we assume a market price of £50/MWh, the output of (maybe) 280 MWh a year is worth £14000. Even ignoring maintenance and interest costs, the cost of £4.2 million would have a payback period of 300 years!
Historians will look back at this strange episode in human history, and compare some of the things we are wasting money on with Nero’s follies.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
€5m / £4.2m for 1km – chickenfeed.
How about €3m / £2.4m for 0.07km?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/05/worlds-first-solar-cycle-lane-opening-in-the-netherlands
Despite the gushing Graun report that it was planned to be extended by 30m in 2016, there seems to be a dearth of reporting on that particular event.
Gotta love CleanTechnica’s report & image used to report the original scheme.
Alert readers may spot the drawback of the popular scheme.
When you have a Ministry for “Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy”, you can be certain that energy will come a long way down the list of priorities. Of course there is no way the road is “sustainable” by the standard definition of the term, but in the Alice in Wonderland world of politicians, “sustainable” means what ever they want it to mean. The asylum continues to function at peak madness.
The project is said to have cost €5m (£4.2m/$5.1) and was financed by the French government.
= financed by the French taxpayer.
Exactly. Just like the BBC keep saying about EU funded projects in the UK. No it isn’t EU funded. They are paid for out of UK tax payers pockets given to the EU, we are a net contributer to the EU.
Our money given to the EU of which 50% disappears!
Slippery when wet?
Slippery enough when dry. Differential traction between the asphalt on one side of the road and the glass surface on the other is also liable to cause interesting driving conditions. Ass those who have driven in France will know, country roads often have warning signs like this:
“Verglas” is black ice. Now they will need to change the wording to “Panneaux Solaires”
I hope they are well insured for the added accident risk.
When someone changes a tire on the side of the road…?
Add “solar”, “wind”, “renewable” or “sustainable” to your product description and some bureaucrat will fall for it.
So it isn’t actually a solar road, more a solar bike path ?
Unbelievable how bureaucrats spend taxpayers hard earned money isn’t it, and stupid and unintelligent doesn’t begin to describe it.
The ambition of these people (from le FIgaro):
Paving Africa at €5m/km to provide electricity: I think they’ve heard of the UK aid budget seeking something to spend on.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2016/12/22/01016-20161222ARTFIG00124-le-premier-kilometre-de-route-solaire-au-mondeinaugure-en-normandie.php
French Wattway Solar Roadways BUSTED! – nice video ….
Nice vid but I lost alot of respect for the guy when he promoted the false narrative about the Clockmed 9/11 bomb hoax. The only reason he’s critical of solar roads is because he thinks he should be receiving higher subsidies for his rooftop array.
What can you say? Beyond stupid.
Have they figured out that when Cars are actually using it they will create Shadows, thus no generation, so they will be lucky to get even 30% of normally mounted panels and that is before all the degredation due to dirt from Tyre Treads, dust, Tyre marks, Oil film, exhaust soot and surface abrasion.
If you look at the Reuters photo above, they would do a lot better to put the panels in the field at the side of the road. They could then be tilted in the direction of maximum sunlight as per rooftop solar panels and would not be liable to damage or dirt from vehicles.
Also if the panels did need some cleaning or other maintenance, they wouldn’t need to stop the traffic to do it.
Remember when the french were going to power the Eiffel Tower with wind turbines for the Paris COP meeting ….any one know the final cost/output/payback ???
I wonder how they will hold up to German Tanks ????
Why so negative?
If it works and supplies the local village (that has paid for it) then there is less incentive for the local commune to plaster their countryside with wind turbines .
So far as I can see these panels will kill no birds ,(those that have not been hunted to extinction by the villagers ) , will produce no ultrasound hum , nor any disturbing flickering optical effects , – and they look quite neat.
The only disadvantage may be , as pointed out above , to steering if greasy , and the low cost efficiency in terms of energy / euro .However since the latter is not borne by any of us, but by the villagers themselves , just think of it as an interesting experiment .
“The project is said to have cost €5m (£4.2m/$5.1) and was financed by the French government.” So the villagers only paid a small portion, probably too much anyway.
The Adelaide Weather Bureau is forecasting 40℃ for Christmas Day in South Australia, and there are doubts whether we will get through without blackouts thanks to the sort of people who believe this ‘road’ is a good idea.
But have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and the same for our host Robert, and also to you readers.
Except that the village did not pay for it. (Or if they did they would have gotten a bill for over £1000 each)
The French govt (ie taxpayer) paid for it.
THERE WILL BE NO POWER PRODUCED AFTER SUNSET
Gottit? How can it produce “enough power to run the village’s street lights” when it’s dark?
You forgot the diesel generator option.
I’m struggling to think of any reason why anyone would think that this was a good idea. Solar panels are a pretty rubbish way of generating electricity anyway, expensive and intermittent. But, if you must install them, despite their shortcomings, put them on roofs, on wasteland that maybe couldn’t be used for anything else. Paving a road with the bloody things has to be one of the stupidest ideas that I have ever heard.
“I’m struggling to think of any reason why anyone would think that this was a good idea.”
‘Cos there’s R&D grants to be extracted from gullible taxpayers.
And, there are over-paid civil servants to authorise those grants, and claim their 5 minutes of photo-opportunity at project handover but before performance results are analysed.
See the IET’s take on it here:
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2016/12/world-s-first-solar-road-powers-french-town/
To say that the wattway powers a “town” would perhaps be counted an exaggeration. That the article’s second sentence used the phrase “comprises of” put me in no frame of mind to respect its opinions anyway.
Tis a pity that the streetlights are needed when the solar panels aren’t making electricity, and that when they are, the lights aren’t needed.
I know, I know – there’s a battery. One day, when our collective follies have sent us to join the dodo, aliens flying by will see a glimmer of light in the otherwise eternal darkness of continental European night. Then they’ll swing down and look at what they’ve found and scratch their craniums, if they have them, and wonder how such a mighty race could have perished.
The IET’s credibility sank with it’s utterly, utterly, stupid click-bait headline “World’s first solar road powers French town”
Sadly the credibility of the IET disappeared years ago, particularly the journal E and T. I keep thinking I have received a technical supplement to the Guardian such is the renewable climate change drivel in it. A year or so back they trumpeted a report from some lamebrain that air travel would suffer due to the warming of the troposphere over the Equator changing the jetstream. This would be the warm blob that had already been shown not to exist by taking measurements with balloons etc and was also one of the main tenets of the global warming myth. I came across a copy of the journal from around 2004 and was shocked at how bad it had become. There were lots of informative articles back then. Now I flick through hardly finding anything worth reading except pieces by a former Soviet and a spoof blog about a student son of an engineer.
It was probably 40 year old electricians on work experience who installed the damned panels, just like they do in the UK.
Two faced socialism bullshit as usual…
Two faced crony socialism would be more accurate.
That scheme is Hyperbole not Ecology
.. From today’s Times
pg 35 France opens 1Km of solar roadway costing 17 times more than the equivalent solar panels per KW.
pg47 remaining 48m Smart Meters have to installed within target date of next 3 years.
Yes that’s 60,000 installations per working day !
That would take 8,000 to 10,000 installers, plus support people — doing nothing else.
Who has the contract for the Smart Meters? (Is this an investment opportunity?)
Is everything else ready? Is a system in place to do whatever they are supposed to do?
While connecting another 300,000 each week?
What could go wrong!
Can someone in France visit this place on April Fools’ day and provide and update.
I agree with Stonyground (above): “ I’m struggling to think of any reason why anyone would think that this was a good idea.”
But if they must:
They could put selected parts of a road in a covering or semi-tube of panels. The shaded road would be protected and cooler. Proper tilting of the panels would be possible.
Not necessarily wise, but better.
Avast there ye lubbers, we are all doomed, DOOMED I tell ye!
Well, um………………………….. according to hyperbole telly corporation anyways, cos and I’ve told yers a billion times and more!….. they’re never people who would purposefully exaggerate – now would they?!
20º ?? – in Fahrenheit? and that’s still – 6C……………..or 20F = ± 5ºC?………………………..er confusing their T readings or, and apart from the lurid headline, what are we supposed to adduce from the item in general…………………
from here Biased Broadcasting crap
“confident” that’s so convincing and lookee shes a ‘senior researcher’ – no less.
Nowhere but nowhere can I find specifics in this item, from what data sets, and baseline are they drawing the conclusions from and where and how the temps are measured and here, and presume they are extrapolated from ‘remote sensing’, though see how dramatic are the graphics – did jim spill the red ink again?
“North Pole” or, “Arctic region?” make your ferkin minds up.
This is specious bollocks dressed up as Shock Horror reportage though actually it’s just more Fake news/post truth news to scare the bejabbers out of those who would even consider to vote for those awful ‘populists’ as the beeb so condescendingly names them……. and is so typical of al beeb.
as is their wont, they throw in a non sequitur……………I mean are we talking about the Arctic basin or but – reindeer are [maybe] struggling and keeps it topical innit.
Have a warmy warmy Christmas everybody!
Athelstan you missed the best bit of the article (my bold):
Asked if the conditions on Christmas Eve were likely to affect Santa’s all-important journey, Dr Markus said he was confident that his sled would cope with the conditions.
He added: “Santa is most likely overdressed though. Maybe in the future we’ll see him in a light jacket or plastic mac.”
It’s currently -11°C in Lapland.
Priceless:
Only -11ºC?! ha ha ha ……………..brr – and that’s a warm day !!……to me – that’s bloody perishing, and I wonder what are the current ambient temps in and around the great lakes – at the mo’?
Mind you, Santi clawsis these days, they don’t know what cold weather is…………..when I was a lad………
😉
Minus eleven – that’s barely worth a t-shirt in Newcastle judging by the crowd at St James’s Park and the pictures of their folk out for a night on the town.
The Wattway?
Are they trying to implicate one of their fiecest critics?
How long before they repave with yellow bricks?
Hmm…now if we could just arrange for a caterpillar with steel tracks to go for a drive along there.
D9 with sharp ripper!………
What a good idea and cripes if you’re on a push bike watch out for the skid side road, it’s a diabolically loony idea but then again when did green thinking ever come up with aught else?
Reblogged this on Climate Collections and commented:
Paul Homewood’s analysis of the solar panel roadway.