Solar Conways, Five Years Later

Five years ago, the Antiplanner looked skeptically on a proposal to build solar roadways. This idea received nearly $2.3 million in pledges through crowdsourcing plus $850,000 from the federal government.

A couple of years later, France installed a one-lane-wide solar roadway that was one kilometer long at a cost of $5.2 million. (Normally paving such a road would cost well under $1 million.) Now, after running this roadway for three years, the results are in: it’s a flop.

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“It is a total absurdity to innovate at the expense of solutions that already exist and are much more profitable, such as photovoltaics on roofs,” commented one expert. This is just what the Antiplanner and many others said back in 2014. Of course, government officials are more interested in dazzling people with new projects than whether those projects make sense.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

3 Responses to Solar Conways, Five Years Later

  1. Dreadcthulhu says:

    With how mind-boggling stupid this project was, I have to wonder if the officials in France who approved it were getting some sort of kickback. I would rather believe they were corrupt than that dumb.

  2. LazyReader says:

    You wanna go green, Go Nuclear. Before Nuclear was only electricity, However now the potential for nuclear to do things before only done with fossil fuels. High temperature reactors, where temps push 600 degrees celsius you can do industrial heat applications without carbon dioxide or combustion. You can …
    – split water into hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most valuable industrial gases in the world. You can take coal and thru fischer tropsch convert it to synthetic aviation fuel. One reason the Luftwaffe almost kicked our asses in WWII, they used synthetic fuels instead of refined petroleum and it had a 10% greater power density. Thats when we came up with ethyl fuel. We could turn coal from the filthiest fuel on the planet into sulfur free; and turn 50 dollar a ton junk into 1800 dollar per ton jet fuel and turn coal country into the aviation fuel capital of the nation. And the sulfur rather than go in the atmosphere; Sulfur has thousands of industrial uses.

    Besides that coal ash the mineral content of coal that cement companies would kill for. Coal and coal ash is also a concentrated source of rare earths……..which hold key for extraction using heat without the ENORMOUS toxic waste profile of mining and processing them.

    With the reactors waste heat, you can do some water desalination without the enormous electricity consumption. There in California, Texas, Hawaii, Virigin Islands aside from a little rain, you get almost no additional water regardless of weather reports, it’s a perpetual drought from here on out. Be nice to get some fresh water without pumping the aquifers as much anymore or better yet regenerating the aquifers by pumping new water into them.

    From a economy standpoint you can start to use reactors for industrial heat output. 72% of the worlds energy is thermal based because it’s efficient to convert thermal energy into work without having to convert it to electricity. You convert to electricity you lose half to 2/3rds of the energy as waste heat; that’s why manufacturing gases is ridiculously inefficient using electric power other wise everyone would do it. If you can produce hydrogen in large quantities and nitrogen via cryogenic distilling (using heat as the sink source) you can economically produce Ammonia without the energy intensive Bosch process and manufacture fertilizer without substantial pollution. Hydrogen has numerous other industrial applications, metal making, polymer manufacture, chemical making. You can start light metal extraction from human waste (potassium, Sodium, Phosphates). You can manufacture methanol from CO2 and hydrogen and replace or substitute automotive fuels.

    All in all, and here’s where your public policies start to come in; you’re talking about disrupting a 72 TRILLION dollar supply chain market that was heavily dependent on fossil fuels to power most of these industries. Once you can start to not only decarbonize but de-politicize your economy and means of production you can do some amazing things in the geo-poltical spectrum.

    You have countries where 85-95+ percent of their income, GDP come from petroleum and petroleum distillates; beyond simply meeting those industrial needs mentioned above, not to mention their domestic energy use. Beside the fact they’re not particularly Western world friendly; are sponsors of terrorism the world over; Petroleum and petro dollars constitute the bulk of their political power including the influence of WESTERN elections…..And some strange things are gonna start to happen to those societies when their not needed anymore.

  3. Henry Porter says:

    “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” –Dr. Thomas Sowell

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