French City Installs 187 Solar Panels to Save on Energy Costs, Forgets to Connect Them

Officials in the French city of Roubaix recently revealed that the 187 photovoltaic panels that were supposed to generate green electricity for the local library had been installed six months ago, but not connected to the building’s electrical grid…

In June of 2019, thew city of Roubaix announced with great fanfare that it had acquired 187 solar panels meant to generate part of the electricity required by the local library. The panels were installed by local company Sunretec at a cost of 103,000 euros ($113,000), but somehow everyone forgot to actually connect them to the library’s electrical grid, which means that for six months the panels didn’t produce any of the electricity consumed by the Roubaix library.

The 187 solar panels were supposed to produce about a quarter of the energy required by the city library, but while trying to connect a wind turbine designed to produce clean energy as well, everyone realized the panels were not producing any electricity at all.

“We realized that this was not the case,” Alexandre Garcin (LREM), deputy mayor of Roubaix, told La Voix du Nord, without going into detaiuls about how the blunder occurred. Somehow, no one at city hall noticed that the library’s electricity bill hadn’t gone down at all after the panels were installed.