Solarpunk Travel

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Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.

related to sustainable travel:

[email protected] ← open to all train chatter (but note the instance is centered on the midwest USA)
[email protected] ← UK Rail and Trains
[email protected] ← UK public transport

related to travel generally:

[email protected] ← general travel
[email protected] ← general travel (this whole instance devoted to travel but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule there)
[email protected] ← Europe focus

The communities listed above are decentralized. Centralized instances are omitted as they go against the fedi purpose and it’s better to cultivate digital rights in the free world. That means instances that have a disproportionately large population or are centralized on Cloudflare are not listed.

founded 1 year ago

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The Dutch are riding their bikes on two new solar cycle paths (electrek.co)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The act of making them so that can be ridden on significantly reduces their output.

Combined with laying flat instead of at a favourable angle... These solar paths and roadways are a terrible idea.... And I'm someone who loves solar.

EEVblog on YouTube goes into good detail about this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

What no one mentions is how harmful concrete (cement) is for climate. I can’t see the pics on my connection but if these things are a substitute for concrete, that could be a plus in itself assuming the GHG of these panels is low.. Though I don’t suppose that’s necessarily the case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The energy required to produce the solar panels is huge, is even go as far to say worse than concrete.

The panels are usually embedded in a resin, or urethane or some plastic like material, extra thick too, to withstand the traffic over it.

All that combined with the reduced energy yeild from the compromised use situation... It's not great.

Solar on rooftops has far higher output per area. This better return somewhat offsets the energy that goes into them.