Latest breakthrough of electrical solar power generation using pedestrian road....

The new way of Solar power utilization

World’s First Solar Road Is Now Open in France Tough enough to withstand the impacts of constant use by heavy vehicles, including commercial trucks. Thin enough to minimize construction costs by being placed over existing roads. Designed not only to collect solar power, but also to potentially provide storm water management and reduce above-ground power lines. 

The ideals behind the development of photo voltaic panels to replace paved roadways are, it seems, constantly evolving. The biggest problem right now with the notion of “solar roads”, it seems, is their cost. As one science writer quipped, “Sure, we could pave the streets with solar panels, but we could also pave them with gold.”Anglo-French company Colas, the corporate powerhouse behind the opening of the world’s first solar road, is facing that challenge head-on. 

December 22 marks the first day of a two-year pilot project on a 1-kilometer strip of highway in Tourouvre en Perche, a village in Normandy. Two thousand motorists per day will test out the world’s first solar road over the next two years. Theoretically, the photo voltaic panels will collect enough electricity to power the entire village’s street lights. The cost of the 1-kilometer strip (on only one side of the road)? $5.2 million. Critics see the viability of solar roads as simply too expensive for the output the generate, but Colas is already working on ways to bring down the cost of producing the panels.

  Nigeria Engineers like every other developing nations Engineers in Africa are also trying in the area of solar power technology, but more is still required to be done so as to take solar power generation to the next level. Cost is one of the factors hindering the progress of the solar power technology in developing African nations, However our Engineers and Technologists still need to study and conduct more research in the area of utilization of the Solar power system such as tapping from road networks for large scale generation.

In the meantime, France’s Ecology Minister is on board, hoping to replace 1km of every 1,000 in France with solar roads in the near future.Still, the costs are staggering…but determining whether or not the expense is worth the reward is tricky.. If all of the roadways in the United States were replaced by solar panels, the roads could theoretically generate over three times the electricity currently consumed by the nation. The ideas behind the recently-funded Solar Roadways IndieGogo project include not only electricity generation, but storm water filtration, replacement of above-ground power cables, melt snow and light up to alert drivers of road hazards such as animals crossing.

THE CONCEPT IS BRILLIANT
The biggest problem? The cost. Paving all of the highways in the United States would cost, given the current prototypes of solar panels for this type of project, would cost $56 trillion dollars. While a small number of the panels are currently being tested in a sidewalk at a Route 66 welcome center, the two-year pilot currently underway in France might prove to be a better indicator of the effectiveness of photo voltaic roadways.