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French solar road is a flop but...
The world’s first solar road, built nearly three years ago in France, has turned out to be a flop: as a way to harvest solar power, in terms of making money by reselling energy – and as a road.
The French company that built it says, however, that it has been a useful exercise in showing how such technology behaves in practice.
The road hit several problems:
- It failed to meet its power production target of 790kWh per day, hitting just 40% of production;
- It failed to produce an expected €20,000 from power sales to EDF, bringing in only €8,000;
- It failed as a road surface, with residents complaining of noise and the solar panels splintering under the weight of HGVs.
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The €5million one-kilometre road opened at Tourouvre in Orne, Normandy, in December 2016 and was paid for by the government as an open-air testbed.
It attracted widespread interest at its launch – it was officially “opened” by ecology minister Ségolène Royal – and has brought in curious visitors from as far afield as the Far East.
Despite fears that the road would be scrapped and relaid with Tarmac, its builder Colas says a 400m stretch will be relaid with new solar panels and fitted with bus shelters and pedestrian crossings lit by the power produced.
The company said Tourouvre was the first of 40 sites it opened to test new materials.
It was chosen as the town had a solar panel factory – now closed – and was keen to take part.
Experiments will continue with the new generation of panels. They are intended to cope better with HGV loads than the previous ones, which had only been tested in the laboratory.
Although Tourouvre was not the best in France for sunlight exposure, Colas said the results had shown that it was a better answer to produce small road sections or even railway platforms that produced electricity to, for example, power lights.
The first systems will be installed later this year.
Standing room only... New benches fitted with solar panels built into the seats provoked mockery when a mayor’s assistant announced their installation in time for the G7 summit in Biarritz – but asked people “not to sit on them too much during the sunniest times of the day so they can produce maximum [power]”.
