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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

The solar panels on roads idea has been tried. Rotting leaves were a big source of its failure.

https://www.businessinsider.com/first-solar-road-france-fail...

It failed because building an efficient solar panel is already hard enough without thousands of cars running over them. Just build a solar-roof instead.

Doesn’t matter. Much of the US roads aren’t anywhere near trees - ie the southwest. Huge amount of roads and solar power potential there too. Also, cleaning crews are a thing that have existed in the past and should again.

Replace leaves with tumbleweeds. Or whatever natural debris we have in the west.

The leaves were causing damage to the solar panels. I imagine other types of debris would do the same.

But I'd be happy to be wrong. Have you asked why this hasn't already been done yet? Or if it has (besides the example I provided), what was the outcome?

Have you spent much time driving in the empty areas of the west? You can go 100 miles without even seeing a tumbleweed.

I've been living in the west my whole life and have traveled between Colorado to California through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc 7 or 8 times, so yes I've seen an empty western road before. Tumbleweeds was tongue in cheek but there's plenty of dirt, trash and other flying debris that will get baked onto a glassy surface out southwest.

Well, even in the Sahara there's sand and sandstorms piling it on solar panels...

There's no place that's 100% immune from all dirt/leaves/etc.

Still shouldn't be much of a problem in practice...

I think the key difference is whether the panel is placed at ground level (as in a solar road) or raised (as in most large-scale solar installations where the panels are raised on mounts that can also move and track the sun). The latter is pretty much self-cleaning when it comes to dry debris because the wind would eventually blow them away onto the ground (where the former will collect them forever).

I agree on both. It (degree fouling of the solar panels) is a fact of things, but shouldn't impact things much pragmatically.

I think that we can expect the same amount of accumulation of stuff as we currently get on these roads. Its not like we're out there street sweaping these rural highways, but they're also not covered in debris.

3/4 of Nevada is owned by the federal government and is dry to the point no one wants to be there anyway. Including planets. From your list, you probably haven’t seen the part of the Southwest which I was referring to earlier. As others have said, too, maintenance is going to be a thing for any form of energy.

In the southwest, I'd imagine dust would be the biggest hindrance.

GP said the median, not the roadway itself.

One thing that I don't get about this and related stories: if the road surface is damaged as badly as they say, then why are there no pictures of the damage (the one picture showing damaged modules is described as not taken from modules instLled on the road)? Also, I googled several other stories and none of them has hard facts on why it failed, essentially speculating about different reasons.

Something about this story is not quite right, at least the way it was reported in English language media.

I can’t read the article, but previous articles I have read on the subject indicated that the road authorities who evaluated the tech never found it suitable to install on a public roadway to begin with. Besides the durability/maintenance issues, it also had lower friction than a normal road surface. I think one here in the US gave it a trial run as a sidewalk and even that use was a failure when the freeze and thaw cycle of the ground broke them.

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