NEWS
SOLAR ROADS TO POWER
FRANCE
France’s minister of Ecology and Energy announced that the country will
pave 621 miles of road with solar panels over the next five years, with the
goal of providing cheap, renewable energy to five million people.
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HSE INTERNATIONAL
Idaho raised more than $2 million through Kickstarter in
2014 and received a two-year contract from the Federal
Highway Administration to develop their own solar
roadways. However, this is the first time a panel has been
designed to be laid directly on top of existing roads and the
first project to install the panels on public highways.
For many environmentalists, paving roadways with solar
panels sounds like a great idea. Colas says 215 square feet
of Wattway will provide enough energy to power a single
French home (aside from heating), but some researchers
are still skeptical that solar roadways will ever be efficient
and cost-effective enough to compete with regular rooftop
solar panels.
It will be difficult for photovoltaic glass to compete
against the much cheaper asphalt, for example, and
rooftop panels are better placed to get the best possible
sunlight, researcher Andrew Thomson wrote in The
Conversation. He added that if solar roadways prove to be
more slippery than traditional roadways, safety concerns
could kill the burgeoning technology, regardless of how
much power they may put out.
“For solar roadways to be effective, it needs a complete
technological rethink,” he wrote.
For now, French authorities are going ahead with the
project, and will start laying down segments of Wattway
this coming spring.
Source: http://www.hseinternational.co.uk/solar-roads-to-power-france/
C
alled “the Wattway,” the roads will be built in
collaboration with the French road-building company
Colas and the National Institute of Solar Energy. The
company spent the last five years developing solar panels
that are only about a quarter of an inch thick and are
hardy enough to stand up to heavy highway traffic without
breaking or making the roads more slippery. The panels
are also designed so they can be installed directly on top of
existing roadways, making them relatively cheap and easy
to install without having to tear up any infrastructure.
“There is no need to rebuild infrastructure,” Colas CEO
Hervé Le Bouc told Myriam Chauvot of French magazine Les
Echoes last year. “At Chambéry and Grenoble, was tested
successfully on Wattway a cycle of 1 million vehicles, or 20
years of normal traffic a road, and the surface does not
move.”
The panels are made out of a thin polycrystalline silicon
film and coated in a layer of resin to strengthen them
and make them less slippery. Because the panels are so
thin, they can adapt to small changes in the surface of
the pavement due to temperature shifts and are sealed
tightly against the weather. According to Colas, the panels
are even snowplough-proof, although ploughs need to be
a little more cautious so as not to rip the panels off the
ground.
France isn’t the first country to kick around the idea of
paving its roads with solar panels. In November 2015, the
Netherlands unveiled a 229-foot-long bike path paved with
solar panels as a test for future projects, and a couple in