I actually almost find myself in total agreement with this Climate Progress article
In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.
The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single small household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.
“If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square meter per year,†Sten de Wit, a spokesman for the project — dubbed SolaRoad — told Al Jazeera America. “We predicted [this] as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.†(big snip)
Though the Netherlands’ solar road seems to be going as planned, solar roads overall typically aren’t as effective at producing energy as solar arrays on a house or in a field. That’s because the panels in solar roads can’t be tilted to face the sun, so they don’t get as much direct sunlight as panels that are able to be tilted. However, solar roads don’t take up vast tracts of land, like some major solar arrays do, and they can be installed in heavily-populated areas.
I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think these kinds of projects are great ideas, and should be supported. Not for “climate change”, but simply for the reason that we should take advantage of “free” energy, such as solar energy, and use it. In this case, the energy should be used to provide lighting for the bike roadway. Paving helps create the Urban Heat Island Effect: why not offset it by using the roadway to produce energy?
The energy produced is rather low for solar panels, yet, the point of using roadways is still a good one. Of course, the cost needs to come down quite a bit. It supposedly cost $3.3 million to create this half mile of bike roadway. You could power quite a few homes for that chunk of change.
There are other projects out there to produce energy from roadways, both by turning them into solar receptors and from driving over the roadways. IMO, these projects should be supported if they show promise.
