Netherlands unveils world's first solar bike lane
bbc.com
bbc.com
As always, just follow the money and you can find out what's going on.
For the record, we contribute more money to the European Union per capita than any other member state.
Source: local news a while ago, and http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/22/eu-budg...
> The total electricity consumption in the Netherlands lays around 110,000 GWh and increases annually by about 3% (according to CBS Netherlands). This means that if all suitable roofs in the Netherlands would be equipped with solar panels, they could only supply approximately 25% of the Dutch electricity demand.
Even though not every rooftop has one yet due to the cost of it (and some people find it ugly, like my father, he absolutely does not want us or our neighbors to have it :/), in the long run there is also not enough space. At least, that's what the company who makes this material is saying. Even if they are biased and we assume it's only half as bad as they tell us, we're still at only 50% of the demand.
Source: http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/ (under "Why would you include solar cells in the road and not next to it or on rooftops?")
Putting it more directly: would YC think that this is a good investment of money? I think you wouldn't even get an interview.
This is called research and development. They're not replacing all the roads and cyclepaths with this stuff, they are testing and developing it because we will need it in the future.
Also, I do not appreciate the "you" in that sentence.
Sometime the idea is just outright stupid, like flying cars.
Solar roadways, though? I don't see any need that actually meets.
I am just very sensitive about public funded projects.
To give you an example:
"XYZ is a project co-founded by the European Union that aims to validate how to approach Open & User Driven Innovation methodologies to the Public Sector in a scenario of Future Internet Services for Smart Cities. It will do so, by leveraging existing tools, trials and platforms in Crowdsourcing, Open Data, Fiber to the Home and Open Sensor Networks in seven major European cities: Helsinki, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Barcelona and Bologna."
Would YC fund that? Would they get an interview?
The EU gave 3M€ for that. The outcome is three websites that nobody uses.
There are companies in the EU specialised for grant grabbing. They will get 10% of the funding if the application succeeds.
The EU funds 50% and the expected outcome is that the funded companies will create a viable product out of it. Now tell me, why do the same companies funded over and over again?
Just google for "Wetab". The same company of that miserable disaster was on plenty of EU funded projects.
Thanks. It can be used both ways but being a Dutchman I wasn't sure. Not my native tongue either :)
I understand your issues with publicly funded projects, and where there is money there will always be abuse. I've interned at a company that did research because they could get it subsidized and I know they wouldn't if they didn't get that money; it was simply too expensive (they didn't have a lot to spend). However that is also the goal of the grant/subsidy: stimulating companies to do that very research (if I remember correctly it was something about VoIP, not sure).
So yeah people make money with it, but it also helps development. I too think that €3 mil is a bit much for 70m of cyclepath, but if it's the first in the world... gotta start somewhere when you have huge R&D costs. If you read their FAQ, they are testing for a lot of things like slickness, reflection, strength, etc. I always just hope they know more about it than I do.
Well, if that would be the criterium, a lot of great investments would never have happened. E.g. many railroad routes that were constructed in the late 19th century took decades to be profitable. However, in the very long term they were good investments. Luckily, we had/have governments that are bold enough to invest in stuff that doesn't lead to an IPO the next 5 or 10 years.
Be happy with 25% from solar, if you can sustain that. After that, work on wind or thermal solar or natural gas or nuclear or tidal or something.
> The approximately 140,000 km of roads in the Netherlands cover a total area of about 400-500 km2, which is significantly larger than the total (suitable) roof surface area.
The FAQ: http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/
(Btw, I wasn't the one who downvoted you.)
To me this is very questionable marketing non-sense. You take the excellent bicycling culture of the Netherlands, you combine it with solar energy and the result is profit.
Just exchange Wcycling track" with "landfill" and tell everybody you'd cover them for 300 times the normal price with solar panels and you'd be kicked in the balls.
Where did you get that from? From the site of this initiative (http://www.solaroad.nl/en/faq/):
> The total electricity consumption in the Netherlands lays around 110,000 GWh and increases annually by about 3% (according to CBS Netherlands). This means that if all suitable roofs in the Netherlands would be equipped with solar panels, they could only supply approximately 25% of the Dutch electricity demand.
Depends on where you are. Ground in the Netherlands is expensive, since it has a relatively high population density. Roofs alone do not provide enough surface to provide energy to the whole population.
There are many more promising sources of energy for a country with a relatively small amount of sunny days (wind, energy harvested from tides). But this is apparently just a testing strip, so supposedly they just want to test the yield, durability, etc.
EEVblog #632 - Solar Roadways Are BULLSHIT! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS6TUVSZds
And it's not just how he says it, he talks so much around it... For example he says:
> Now, one of the major claims is that well these things generate excess energy and yeah they probably will under decent conditions and it'll generate decent revenue and it'll pay for themselves. Well, let's do some calculations on that. This will be fairly simplistic but it'll give us a good [ballpark?]. You can go a little deeper into the lifecycle analysis and all sorts of stuff which you won't worry about. Now, I'm gonna be incredibly generous yet again and I'm gonna assume that the LEDs consume no power at all. So we're just looking at this figure up here that we've got 380Wh/m2 per day. Remember, that's pretty much an ideal practical maximum, a fair, you know, a good [location?]. So, let's have a look at the figures. Shall we?
Filtering it down to the content, we get:
> They claim to be profitable, but that is probably under ideal conditions. Let's do some basic calculations. For simplicity I'll leave out the LEDs and go with the ideal maximum of 380Wh/m2 per day.
That took two minutes and I didn't even make it to the results before clicking away. I just can't stand it. Anyone else having this?
---
But in any case, according to the article this is the first ever live test. He's talking about some kickstarter apparently, they didn't make it I guess?
For his rant videos, he does put less time and improvise more, this cause that kind of videos. It's not representative of his usual videos.
The indiegogo campaign he is talking about did make it, well beyond their goal, they got $2.2m while they were only asking $1m.
From the article:
- It's 30% less efficient than roof-mounted systems
- Each set of panels is encased in concrete and glass
- These systems cost 3x more to install
The 30% drop in efficiency is a dream. It's worst than that. Fill the road with bikes dirt, trash, grease, oil and surface abrasions (or cars in the case of a future solar road) to get real numbers. This simply isn't sensible. It's akin to building a solar array and planting huge trees over it.
The fact that the panels require thick concrete and thick truck-proof glass makes this terribly expensive. There's an environmental and energy cost here.
In other words, environmentally, it takes a lot more pollution (waste materials and the overall industrial process) to make each of these panels than it does to make panels that don't have to support a truck. Imagine these modules being made in China to be shipped via tanker truck to Europe or the US while burning millions of metric tonne's of nasty polluting bunker fuel.
Ditto for energy. It takes energy to make, transport and install heavy glass and concrete. I wonder if these panels will ever make back the energy required to manufacture and install them. No data on this, of course, just educated conjecture on my part. I do think I'm right.
On the matter of cost, it should be obvious that such an installation is massively more expensive than roof-mounted panels. I would go as far as suggesting this might be massively more expensive even in the case of roof mounted panels when a structure has to be built to support them.
Maintenance costs would be very high, requiring constant washing, cleaning, removal of leaves and dirt and polishing just to maintain the substandard energy production level offered.
What would the cost and performance metrics be if you took the same length bike road, built a structure over the entire length and mounted the panels atop this structure? My guess is that cost would be significantly lower. Maintainability would be massively cheaper and easier. And energy production efficiency would gain perhaps an order of magnitude when compared to a road full of bicycles, dirt, leaves, etc.
Such quick analysis --didn't even have to open a spreadsheet-- makes me believe projects like these have to be politically driven at some level. I can't see any economic or technical angle whatsoever under which something like this makes sense even at a small scale. And I don't think that scale makes it better.
I wonder if someone familiar with what led to the approval of such a project might be able to shed some light with further details.
EDIT: Spelling. Added a bit about maintenance.
EDIT #2: To address the "if we covered every rooftop we would only produce 25% of the energy the country needs."
What a fantastic problem to have that would be!
Look, at that point you build steel structures atop all the main train tracks and mount solar arrays kilometers long all over the country.
Not enough? Build similar structures atop roads where it makes sense and put solar arrays there.
Not enough? Can you add more wind power.
Not enough? Can you add wave/tidal power generation
Not enough? Can you add nuclear.
Not enough? Can you make a push for more efficient power utilization? BTW, this is probably the best thing the world could do.
Not enough? Well, if the goal is to be 100% solar --which might not be sensible-- you are going to need to use all available surface area as efficiently as possible. Destroying your roads to then install solar roads is unlikely to produce the desired results.
Since you will always have to pave roads anyway, it makes some sense for them to have a dual purpose, no?
Laying roads is exceptionally expensive anyway - requiring the roads to be high quality enough that they work as solar roads has the dual benefit that these can be more effectively maintained as a pair.
The next issue is that in most developed countries you would have to first destroy a road before installing solar modules. I can't even guess at the cost of doing that, even if you recycle the materials. Remember that all of these activities have an environmental cost in burning petroleum. The trucks and equipment doing all the work and moving the materials and waste are burning fossil fuels. Even a hamburger has a petroleum cost factor due to transportation and manufacturing steps.
Is it a good idea for less developed countries where there might be no road? No, it's a horrible idea. The last thing those countries need are high-tech roads with 3x the installation cost and 1000x the maintenance cost.
Roads are repaved all the time, so you wouldn't necessarily have to do any extra road destroying. It is frequently the case that the deck is stripped and reused though.
If you make roads dual purpose structurally, you get the worst of both worlds.
You end up with a road that is a terrible road. You end up with solar panels that are terrible as solar panels.
The core design needs of a road are so drastically anti that of a solar panel, there is no hope of combining them in an effective way in the next few decades until we have drastic breakthroughs in materials or transportation (ie we stop driving multi-thousand pound vehicles with tires on top of our roads; even then it'd be better to just run the panels to the side of the future road and elevate them).
If there is any deliberate design of roads, it's only that they degrade fairly gracefully and repair is built into the cost. But this frequently leads to corrupt practices such as kickbacks (at the least, this is a common public perception) or extended periods of poor quality roads.
Surely a better solution is to design the roads more carefully to avoid such a level of degradation. Since this matches the design required for solar panels, this could be a great driver for change.
Not to mention that the lane pictured in the article has an adjacent row of trees that appear to cast shadows directly on the solar cells. Any solar technician will tell you that alone is enough to render any array nearly useless.
It should be obvious to everyone here that this is just an MVP.
What better way to prove or disprove the idea? Measure how it performs in the real world, with dirt, abrasions, rain and temperature variation.
Then iterate.
If it's not feasible at all, then you stop.
I think you could make a significantly more minimal MVP than this. A single panel of a couple square meters, for a lot less than $1.5m euros, embedded in a pre-existing path. Maybe a few in different locations around the country. Monitor how they perform. Then if it's anywhere close to viable, move to a bigger model.
One word: Mathematics.
Sorry. Not trying to be clever or condescending. There are lots of ideas in business and engineering that can be evaluated to a reasonable margin of error with simple math on a single piece of paper or, at worst, a spreadsheet with equally simple calculation. This is one of those things.
EDIT: I'm not normally one to complain about downvotes, but this has gotten 2 now; I find that completely inexplicable. Really, where's the value proposition in putting solar cells on the ground, in the shade, not aligned to the sun, where they'll get dirt and grime tracked on them, and having to spend 20x as much to manufacture them to withstand vehicle traffic? Even as an MVP, this seems foolish.
Because it's not meant to be profitable. It's a test; an experiment. Do you think the first first time anyone ever put a solar panel on their roof to test with that it was profitable?
I don't see the value proposition, now or in the future, for solar panels on the ground, not aligned to the sun, with layers of protection on top of them, where they'll often be in the shade. Like someone else said, it seems like you can validate or invalidate this idea by using mathematics without ever setting up a full-scale multi-million-currency-unit experiment.
Here's the Der Spiegel article, the BBC piece linked to:
http://www.spiegel.de/reise/aktuell/solarradweg-in-den-niede...
Hopefully you can Google-translate it in Chrome.
Better off looking for ways to reduce rolling resistance on road surfaces.