Sometimes, however, the unnameable blog is worth reading. For instance, in a recent post, Will Eschenbach engages in an all-out attack against the “solar roads” plant in Idaho. The post is appropriately titled, “The Road to Hell is Paved with Solar Panels” and, in it, Mr. Eschenbach criticizes the plant mainly in terms of the cost of the energy produced. He says that it produced 246 kWh in one year. Comparing with the total cost of the plant, said to be more than 4 million dollars, then, clearly, it is a bad deal.
Eschenbach has a point here, although, for fairness, we must note that the plant was never conceived as a commercial plant, it is a prototype or a demonstrator which involved a cost in terms of the development of special panels for a specific task. It is unfair to pretend from a prototype to generate a profit. The point is, the performance of the prototype good enough to be worth reproducing at a commercial scale?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
