"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."
I have come across quite a few “green” initiatives over the past several years which are extremely questionable in their technicals - and all are taking public money, mostly from European Development Funds in the EU, and from similar bodies elsewhere.
They are usually highly visible, buzzword bingo initiatives. You see these projects in the press - a group grinning in hard hats, a colourful initiative behind them. You go back a few years later and it’s tape and barriers and broken glass and danger signs.
Whether folks start with good intentions but then move on, or don’t have adequate plans for maintenance (which then makes one wonder why funding was granted in first place), or simply see an opportunity to extract wealth from a public body, I don’t know.
An anecdote: a service station near my home in north wales proudly announced that they had received a grant to put on a turf roof, solar and wind power. EU funding. Three years on, and they’ve just announced that they’ve received a grant to do exactly the same thing. Plumbing the Europa site shows that the previous grant was paid, and the project reported as completed - but they never did a thing. I’ve seen the same cycle being pulled elsewhere.
There is such a push for governments to be visibly green that they are spending money on highly visible nonsense. The current elected power gets the boost for snipping the ribbon and providing the funding. Their successor gets a beating over the wasteful failed project.
There are good green initiatives happening, but it’s usually where nobody is looking.
> An anecdote: a service station near my home in north wales proudly announced that they had received a grant to put on a turf roof, solar and wind power. EU funding. Three years on, and they’ve just announced that they’ve received a grant to do exactly the same thing. Plumbing the Europa site shows that the previous grant was paid, and the project reported as completed - but they never did a thing. I’ve seen the same cycle being pulled elsewhere.
This should be reported to media, police or both - this is fraud.
After my previous experiences reporting fraud to the police, I think it’s best I leave them to figure this out for themselves. I don’t particularly want to be arrested, or charged with fraud.
I haven't seen anything from it yet that would convince me that it's not a scam. The fact that there are people defending this after all this time baffles me.
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).
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.
That's a pretty expensive experiment, and they could have tested each independently (install a few meters of panels near a tree and near a farm). Instead, they installed 1km of road and the minister of energy hoped to drastically increase the amount of these roads within a fairly short time frame (5 years), which tells me they didn't consider it an experiment (just a conservative rollout).
This feels like fraud to me, and some lack of reasoning on the part of the government officials who accepted this project.
Yes, $5M isn't huge by government standards, but it's pretty big compared to simpler testing options available to a company who plans to fall back to powering CCTVs (hopefully not with parking lot panels...).
As a proof of concept trial it wasn't very expensive. Unrelated, but just for comparison it cost about a much as Uber lost every 2.5 hours in 2019Q2.
They built a Minimum Viable Product for a trial and found out that it wasn't actually viable and didn't provide the hoped for value. They probably also learned a lot with real world experience (that they wouldn't have been sure to have in a staged setup) and may come back with something different in the future.
Personally I'd be curious about the math on how much these panels pick up, whether some kind of contactless power transmission would be viable at highway speeds, and whether in 15-20 years we'll see interstates paved with these providing trickle power to fully automated electric trucks running as "road trains" across the country.
Have there been any trials on creating a solar roof over highways? It seems like a much better option as the panels don't need to be reinforced, and they can be angled towards the sun to aid cleaning. We already know how to build stable metal framed structures (and panels aren't that heavy). In somewhere like Spain it would reduce the requirement for AC while driving, making it even more green. During rain it would increase visibility and reduce water on the road, making the road safer.
If you're building new structures I'm positive that the economics work out better for simply doing separate solar farms. Building them above a road has no major advantages and potentially both increases construction costs and increases the chances of unfortunate interaction (eg an accident taking out panels).
The sweet spot for solar roads would be in places where the generation benefit outweighed the extra cost when a road was being redone anyway - and even then only if the materials were up to the task.
Still, power sourced from solar or wind in general and adequate to offset some of the "maintain speed" level of power draw? That seems more likely. If you have some way to provide maintenance levels of power during movement that may mean a significant savings in battery weight and overall cost, and if you don't think that matters take a look at the skirts under a lot of trucks designed to reduce drag.
Still, it might be a simple division of labor thing: one group specializes in believing, hard, and pulling in the money, another group says "well, they've got the money, let's try to build the least bad version of this travesty, if we don't take it someone else will"
They were warned about this.