Solar bike path generates enough electricity for three households: Due to be officially launched on 12 November, the project has so far cost €1.5 million euros, though will ultimately cost up to €3 million once finalised.
h/t Regan T
Solar bike path generates enough electricity for three households: Due to be officially launched on 12 November, the project has so far cost €1.5 million euros, though will ultimately cost up to €3 million once finalised.
h/t Regan T
This is a great project! These solar powered roads will soon be as cost-effective and compete with conventional power like coal. Especially when they are installed in northern climates. They will be cost competitive just like wind power and conventional solar power.
/sarc
When you say €3 million it sounds like a lot but there are 3 households involved so that’s only €1 million per household. Plus it’s a one time cost (except for maintenance) so if each house is electrified for say 100 years that’s only €10,000 per year.
On the other hand my hydro bill is about €1200 ($1800) per year, so yes that is kind of crazy.
Amsterdam has a bunch of marijuana cafes. There just might be a cause and effect relationship going on here.
Wonderful. Only three million euros and not only can they generate enough electricity for three households, they can now ride their bicycles from one of those houses all the way past the one next to it to the one next to that. And, presumably, back again!
Looking at the photo showing the installation, you have to figure those trees providing a nice cooling shade will soon have to be labelled as enemies of the Green cause and will have to be cut down.
The stupid…it hurts…
How do you cope with weapons-grade stupid? Sustainable energy is what they reject for these ass-clown technologies – we really need a global shut down of the grid from an EMP event to demonstrate how self sufficient and reliable these Rube Goldberg toys are – perhaps a half a decade of shivering in the dark will enlighten some of these smug Prog-lodytes.
Let’s see. E1m to heat a house, 30% of the time and mostly when it’s not needed. When the snow is deep …
Forget the bike path; just install generators on stationary bicycles and get the leftie cyclists to stop dreaming and actually produce something.
There are so many things insane about this that it’s almost not worth discussing. But let’s explore the true depths of this madness with some numbers, shall we?
It cost 3 million Euros to build 70 metres of roadway. And it powers 3 homes, or 1 million per household. Let’s further assume that electrical demand for households is approximately equal to the transport energy demand (the latter is a bit higher but not much). Ontario has approximately 4 million households, so to power Ontario with this scheme would cost 4 million million or 4 trillion euros. That’s about $6 trillion in our currency.
Now for $6 trillion, you can get about 1500 nuclear reactors which will produce about 6000 TWh (a very conservative number, it’s actually more like 8000 TWh). Ontario’s total electrical energy demand annually is about 150 TWh, so our $6 trillion invested produces at least 40 times as much electricity as this solar roadway.
Now if you just look at the actual transport energy demand in Ontario, it turns out that the whole province if all of its transport was 100 per cent electrified would require the output of about 6 nuclear reactors costing about $24 billion. Again about 40 times less than the solar cost.
Now your nuclear reactor will produce electricity reliably for at least 25 years before it will need a major overhaul for life extension. But it’s very different for the solar roadway. It may be thick enough to hold trucks, but as we all know vehicles do damage to roads fairly rapidly over time. Within a few months the surface will be covered with at least light scratching, converting all the insolation of the roadway from direct to diffuse lighting. That means a loss of 80 per cent of the generating capacity of the solar cells. So at best, the road is going to last no more than about 6 months before it’s effectively destroyed as a generating source, compared with the half-century lifetime of a nuclear reactor.
Not to mention the fact that there’s a slight problem with blowing leaves in fall and snow in winter. It’s not simply that the solar roadway is too expensive. It’s about 100 times too expensive. And no amount of technology improvement is conceivably going to fix that problem in this century or any other. And it has a ridiculously short lifetime compared with just about any other method of making electricity.
Unicorn farts are a better option than this. And probably more likely to happen.
I guess cyclists don’t have shadows, otherwise it would only power 1.5 houses if the path is busy.
The few remaining polar bears in the arctic are partying upon learning of this development.
But using green/lefty “thinking”, since it will only power those three houses half the time i.e. daylight, then it will be rated to actually power six houses since when the three houses aren’t getting energy, three more houses can be not getting energy at the same time so — six houses not supplied from the same source. With greenies, we’re talking neutron star, black-hole, light can’t escape from it dense.
Beat me too it. Given the intelligence of your average government types they will likely ban cycling on the cycling path to prevent shadows.
Looks like a great place for me to practice my “bunny hops” (with studded tires of course).
You might want to check out “Human Power Station” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C93cL_zDVIM) were they use bicycle power to run a house for 12 hours — it took 80 cyclists to cook dinner. The payoff is at the end where they show the total power they produced could have been generated by few lumps of coal or a gallon of diesel
@Pkuster: I too saw the trees. It will be a nice shady path in 10 years. With that consideration, even classifying this as a test track is just plain stupid.
that is a lot of work and money for a bucks worth of electricity. I am guessing when it is dirty as all other roads or bike paths it won’t even generate a bucks worth.
It’s easier to maintain blood pressure during the read if you just think of the kickbacks, graft and payola involved that inflates the price so astronomically as a green tax levied on gullibility.
At $84million a mile the economics should appeal to Comrade Wynne.
The so called carbon footprint of setting this mental mind f**k up from conception to installation far surpasses whatever benefit could be derived from such a fantasy.
As a society, this of course begs the question of, Are we dead enough yet? No?…Well we soon enough will be.
Comrade Wynne is too busy putting solar panels on schools right now. Its hard to find data on this boondoggle but there is a site that publishes the power output of 1 system (http://smps.solarvu.net/green/solarVu.php?dr=smps&ac=smps) — over 3 years it has produced $1500 worth of electricity but the owner/operator has been paid $25,000. Multiply by 5000 (# of schools in Ontario) and the size of this scam is $400M per year.
What kills me is not that this is dumb. Because it is hair pulling, tooth grindingly, self flaggellatingly, put my own hand in the running wood chipper, stupid.
It’s that anyone who has a modicum of engineering/finance natural intelligence has been yelling about how all these “alt-energy” sources are un-economic, un-sustainable, not-ready-for-primetime and vastly harmful for DECADES and showing EXACTLY how bad it is in cold hard numbers, etc… etc…
AND IT DOESN’T SINK IN, and THEY KEEP DOING it “MORE & HARDER”
My only conclusion is that it is raw corruption or such an incredible lack of intelligence that people need to be fired in wholesale lots.
Some people are making tonnes of money off this crap, and pushing the costs to everyone else.
i.e. Politician X lets his buddies make money. And his buddies turn around via another vehicle and scratch his back at once remove.
You’d think a journalist would be following up on this angle…..Crickets…. ( I know, what was I thinking.)
It’s not the people’s fault,,,They were Grubered!
I GOT TO GET ME SOME OF THAT!
— Kathleen Wynne
These green projects never produce the amount of electricity claimed, either. The massive Ivanpah solar farm in California only generated one-quarter of the promised power in it’s first year:
–President Obama was too quick to tout the benefits of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, and its expected electrical generating output. According to the Energy Information Administration, from January through August 2014, its three units generated 254,263 megawatt-hours of electricity, which is about one-quarter of the annual 1 million-plus megawatt-hours that had been anticipated for the plant, allegedly due to fewer sunny days than predicted. Its owners are now requesting a $539 million federal grant to help pay off part of a $1.6 billion federal loan it received to build the plant.–
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67545
But do hot girls like it and will they f@#k me if I’m for it?
I wonder how many more sunny days they will get in California once the extinction level drought is over
“The catch? The technology is also three times more expensive to install.”
More like 300 times more expensive. Nuts!
Oh my oh my. The idiot quoted in the article says that solar panels in roads could be used to power electric vehicles.
Science and engineering go out the window in the minds of the green fascists.
Do these fools have any clue how much power an electric car needs, and that their silly little metro-sexual solar panels will never generate anything close to what is required.
Next up, solar powered runways will power airplanes. Just wait for it.
please don’t let mayor nenshi or Duh Farrell know about this . bad enough we are building bike paths in Calgary .
Seeing as it’s a bike lane, you just know people are gonna walk on it.
Let’s fast forward into the future; am untold number of burka clad mooselimbs are walking on it. How effective is it now?
Squandering the taxpayers money in the name of anything green is so fashionable that speaking out against it just makes you one of those vilified deniers. The road back to sanity will be littered with dreams and memories of the common sense that was thrown away in order to obtain 3rd world status.
Latitude St. John’s NL : 47.6186 N
Latitude Amsterdam : 52.3 N
Both Newfoundland and the Netherlands have long miserable winters without spring, and short winter days. The days in the Netherlands are shorter, but Nfld is
on average colder by about 5 deg C. Solar power is even stupider than wind power in either place.
Note to Tamarax: no, people will not walk on it, because it will also be used by motorbikes and motorcycles. And the ordinary Dutch bicylist is quite ferocious even when
not motorised. I tried, when I lived in Utrecht, but gave it up in favour of a long life.
The more popular this bike path is, the less power it will generate, because, (wait for it, it’s a shocker) people and bicycles cast shadows. If it were 100% utilized, it would generate no power at all. Useless as a screen door on a submarine.
…is encased in a one-inch thick layer of glass…
Lucky glass doesn’t get slippery when it’s wet – could cause a few accidents otherwise