As someone who bikes a lot, please just put trees along the bike paths instead. The summers are getting brutal, even here in Northern Europe, and I'd much rather be able to bike in the shade than this. Even if this was built as a path-cover instead, trees would still be much prettier and more environmental.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Solarpunk Travel
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I want to love the idea but surely these panels can't perform as well as one that doesn't need to be hardened enough to be a bike path. In which case we should only put solar panels in bike paths or roads after we've exhausted all other usable surfaces, like rooftops.
These panels are specialized to be ridden on. Probally not worth diverting funding from more traditional solar surfaces, but if you want to put panels somewhere that is already goverment owned and is absolutely out in the sun, a bike path carrying 500lbs at most is likely a great place to put more panels.
The act of making them so that can be ridden on significantly reduces their output.
Combined with laying flat instead of at a favourable angle... These solar paths and roadways are a terrible idea.... And I'm someone who loves solar.
EEVblog on YouTube goes into good detail about this.
What no one mentions is how harmful concrete (cement) is for climate. I can’t see the pics on my connection but if these things are a substitute for concrete, that could be a plus in itself assuming the GHG of these panels is low.. Though I don’t suppose that’s necessarily the case.
The energy required to produce the solar panels is huge, is even go as far to say worse than concrete.
The panels are usually embedded in a resin, or urethane or some plastic like material, extra thick too, to withstand the traffic over it.
All that combined with the reduced energy yeild from the compromised use situation... It's not great.
Solar on rooftops has far higher output per area. This better return somewhat offsets the energy that goes into them.
For crying out loud, they probably spend 10x as much with this bullshit as just putting some panels on the roof and generating a hundred times as much energy. Let's get the low hanging fruit done first.
I remember when Solar F- Roadways was a thing, I learned a lot about this sort of thing. Solar panels lose a LOT of efficiency if cells are unevenly lit, due to the voltage dropping making it less able to deal with solar panels high resistance. There's also the physical issues with durability, traction, and maintenance. Not to say that these issues haven't been dealt with, but it's a challenge to pull off, to put it politely.
EDIT: read the article, they're using those new flat panels encased in resin on a road that's empty most of the time, so it works out nice for them. I was doing research in enhancing my e-bike with solar power and I can say without a doubt flat panels are absolutely overpowered in fixing basically every major problem that come with standard panels. They're even wired in a way that negates the uneven shading problem. You can just plop them like a sticker on pretty much anywhere with reasonable sun coverage and you're getting value out of them. The only real downside is that they're like double the price for the watts you get, so there's definitely an up-front cost to using them.
What happens after the five years of maintenance mentioned?
Do they let it crumble?
A guess:
I think they'll evaluate it as an experiment.
If it was cost-effective, and doesn't have some other major problem (like a slippery surface which causes people to fall down) they'll renew the contract and build more.
If it wasn't, there is likely some amount of cleanup needed to dispose of it.
Hope it works out, sounds like a great product, especially for a place with so many bike paths
love the creativity! wonder how good of a path it is. for example, how slippy does it get when wet? how does wear happen? etc
could be a project that can pay for itself which is best
⚠ #Enshitification warning: ~100+ clicks and scrolling needed to disable cookies on that page. Which is then followed by an endless loop of XSS warning popups.
Most of the web is unusable without an ad blocker. I recommend Firefox + uBlock origin
Would uBlock or an ad blocker have clicked off all the cookie perms?
In this case I used Tor Browser which is pkgd with noScript. Generally TB configs shouldn’t be tampered with too much because plugins have the side-effect of increasing browser print uniqueness. The XSS popups are not something you would want to block as they emerge from noScript which is doing us a favor by detecting dodgy cross-site scripting.
Sometimes I use ungoogled chromium with uMatrix which trades some privacy for a bit of usability, generally, but Lemmy is unusable in that environment.
It doesn't click the GPDR stuff for you, but it takes care of most trackers. It doesn't provide the kind of anonymity you'll get from the Tor browser though.