Apparently, the Netherlands has run out of rooftops, as it is currently installing solar panels in bike paths. The cost for a pilot project is 3 million euros (about $3.7 million) for 70 meters (230 feet) of bike path. That’s equal to $85 million per mile.
The article doesn’t say, but the Antiplanner estimates from the photos that the path is four meters wide. That means it is costing more than $13,200 per square meter or about $1,225 per square foot.
Sperm count navigate to this amerikabulteni.com viagra cipla plays a vital role in helping you to get an erection. Note that the tablet is not an ailment; it is a condition in which a man starts losing his order generic viagra hairs in a particular pattern. Moisture and humidity may also buy cialis on line cause hearing aid dysfunction. Despite free sample cialis all these regular duties one of the major responsibility is he has to work hard to be financially strong because he has to look after the needs and wants is also at the heart of marketing theory. For comparison, rooftop installation of solar panels costs about $70 to $90 per square foot, while bike paths cost an average of $130,000 per mile, which works out to about $3 a square foot if the path is 8 feet wide, and even less if it is wider. By combining the two, the Dutch have managed to increase costs by at least 13 times.
Worse, the solar panel installed as a bike path will produce about 30 percent less power than one on a rooftop because it can’t be oriented to optimally face the sun. That means the cost per kilowatt is nearly twenty times as much as for a rooftop installation.
“We have 25,000 kilometers of bike paths in the Netherlands,” gushes one of the project developers. Even if costs fall by half, it would cost nearly $30 billion to turn these into solar bike paths. No wonder the developers are so excited! Of course, the agency doing the development, Solaroad, is partly government-owned itself.
Some say that the Netherlands are making green technology even greener. Others say they are proving that the idea for solar roadways is not so crazy after all. The Antiplanner says the Netherlands is proving that government agencies have no sense at all when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars.
There are only two reasons to change energy sources. 1) To save on imported oil. 2) To save on carbon dioxide production. A Republican congress should require that any research project claiming either of these should calculate potential costs saved per barrel of imported oil or tonne of carbon dioxide saved. Any building project should require that the actual costs per barrel of oil or tonne of carbon dioxide saved should be calculated. Only those projects that are cost effective should be funded.
The bottom line is “get the costs”. This has been woefully missing so far in so called “sustainable” energy projects.
Note that a Republican congress is unlikely to remove ethanol biomass requirements as these funnel dollars to Republican held states. A try test of sensible Republican leadership would be to shift ethanol requirements to a cost per tonne of carbon dioxide or barrel of imported oil saved.
Just add in the cost of all the labor and water to keep the panels clean enough to create any meaningful amount of electricity. wasting water is not environmentally friendly.
Roads and sidewalks (made of concrete) constantly crack and buckle as the ground shifts below them. I cannot imagine that solar panels will work very well when that inevitably happens.
The potential problems are endless – the benefits are questionable.
What I’d like to know is the full context of this solar bike path project. If this is truly intended as a working experiment, I wouldn’t make much about it. I’m not a fan of the idea but I understand that we need to do some things to better understand how they work and work through some problems.
If nothing else, it’s good for a slide in a powerpoint at the next Tea Party meeting. “Don’t be like these stupid European Socialists. Be sure to get your city council vote against any proposed bicycling improvments in .”
I meant to type “(your town here)” at the end, shoulda checked the preview..
Well, since light rail is currently at a cool 200 million to half billion a mile, it makes sense that bike paths needed to step up their game, too. How utterly predictable that the government planners would eagerly defend and deflect instead of explaining this gross misuse of taxpayer funds.
The ‘gushing’ link says this:
“The project has so far cost three million euros ($3.7 million), mainly for research, but SolaRoad declined to say what the cost per kilometre might be.”
So the cost in full production is unlikely to be $85 million per mile, or anything like it.
Do users of this path also get free services from prostitutes? Is that part of the cost?