A milling machine went down a rural lane in Normandy in late May and started chewing the road surface out.<\/p>\n
Underneath it were photovoltaic panels, bolted flat into the carriageway\u00a0eight years earlier.<\/p>\n
The council had voted in February to take the whole thing out, and the work took\u00a0about two weeks.<\/p>\n
The interesting part of the solar road is not that the experiment ended.<\/p>\n
It is that every reason it ended was\u00a0known in advance, and printed, before the first panel went down.<\/p>\n
Two weeks with a grinder<\/p>\n
The municipal council of Tourouvre au Perche voted in February of 2024 to have the surface removed.<\/p>\n
The reasons given were\u00a0constant repairs\u00a0and the way the failing sections were getting in the way of local access.<\/p>\n
Demolition started on the twenty seventh of May and was scheduled through the seventh of June.<\/p>\n
By then the installation was already a patchwork, because sections had been pulled out and replaced twice, once in 2020 and again in 2021.<\/p>\n
Those replacements covered only\u00a0a few hundred feet\u00a0of the original run.<\/p>\n
The Wattway director called the experiment a success anyway, saying the surface laid in 2020 went on to be sold at fifty sites, and that\u00a0this road type\u00a0is not suited to fast traffic.<\/p>\n
What it was built to do<\/p>\n
The opening was a national event on the twenty second of December in 2016, with the environment minister on site.<\/p>\n
The specification was tidy. About\u00a030,000 square feet\u00a0of panel, laid over two thirds of a mile of an ordinary rural road.<\/p>\n
Related<\/p>\n
The bill came to\u00a0just over 5 million\u00a0dollars, paid out of state funds, for a stretch you can walk in twelve minutes.<\/p>\n
The stated target was 790 kilowatt hours a day, which is enough to run the street lighting of a town of roughly 3,400 people.<\/p>\n
It was designed to carry about\u00a02,000 vehicles a day, which is the detail most retellings drop.<\/p>\n
This was never a sealed test track. It was a working lane in farm country, and being driven on was the entire point of it.<\/p>\n
Three things went wrong at once<\/p>\n
The panels came loose first. Joints cracked, laminate peeled back, and roughly 300 feet of the surface had to be destroyed and carted off as early as 2018.<\/p>\n
Farm traffic was part of it, because a loaded tractor flexes a road surface in a way\u00a0a car does not, and glass laminate does not like being flexed.<\/p>\n
The second problem was sound. The resin coating rattled loudly enough that the speed limit was cut to\u00a043 miles an hour.<\/p>\n
Then the production figures came in. The first year produced around 150,000 kilowatt hours against a projection near 288,000.<\/p>\n
The next full year came in at about 78,000, and the first half of the year after that at\u00a0roughly 38,000.<\/p>\n
Revenue followed the same curve down, from an expected 11,000 dollars a year to about 3,300 in practice.<\/p>\n
Why flat is the worst angle there is<\/p>\n
None of this comes as a surprise if you start from the physics rather than from the pitch.<\/p>\n
A panel wants a tilt, because tilt is what points it at the sun and what lets rain\u00a0rinse it clean.<\/p>\n
Related<\/p>\n
A road panel gets neither. It faces straight up, it sits in its own dirt, and it has\u00a0no air underneath\u00a0to shed heat.<\/p>\n
Then add shade from every passing vehicle, leaf litter through autumn, road grit year round, and the load of everything that drives over it.<\/p>\n
The comparison that settles it sits in the United States. A drive over lane in Georgia makes around 1,300 kilowatt hours a year, while\u00a0an array<\/a>\u00a0beside a highway in Oregon makes about 128,000.<\/p>\n Same panels, same sun,\u00a0a hundredfold difference, and the only variable is whether cars drive on them.<\/p>\n What the road left behind<\/p>\n The plan this project belonged to was much larger than one lane.<\/p>\n The minister had announced an intention to build\u00a0621 miles\u00a0of solar road across the country within five years, as\u00a0the target<\/a>\u00a0was set out at the time.<\/p>\n None of that network was built, and the company moved instead to small panel modules sized for yards, parking areas and bike paths.<\/p>\n Which is roughly where the technology had always worked, next to the traffic rather than beneath it, the same way an\u00a0offshore array<\/a>\u00a0or a fenced\u00a0solar site<\/a>\u00a0earns its keep by being left alone.<\/p>\n Normandy gets around\u00a044 days\u00a0of strong sunshine in a year, which was in every almanac before the contract was signed.<\/p>\n The lane is ordinary asphalt again, and it carries\u00a0the same traffic\u00a0it always did, over nothing at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A milling machine went down a rural lane in Normandy in late May and started chewing the road…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-585846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}