Sunday, May 4, 2008

Solar-Powered Bridge

Here are some photos of a newish bridge in Sinshih, Tainan County. It's not a bad-looking piece of architecture, and it does help reduce the jams around a particular chokepoint a few hundred meters, which should save time and gasoline.

The bridge has four banks of photovoltaic cells; one set is visible in the photo on the right. Two sets have missing cells. I don't know if they were removed for maintenance, or stolen.

Whether the electricity is used on site, or fed into the general grid, is something I'd like to know. Net metering (also known as FIT) already happens in Taiwan on a small scale.

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