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Tuesday, May 12th, 2015

The World’s First Solar Road Is Successfully Producing Energy

Author:     Katie Valentine
Source:     Think Progress
Publication Date:     May 11, 2015 at 1:29 pm
 Link: The World’s First Solar Road Is Successfully Producing Energy
Stephan:   Beginning about a year SR began covering the project to build the first solar roadway — see the SR archives. This is the latest update, and it is very positive. Imagine a solar roadway interstate system. Electric cars could charge, at some modest fee, or perhaps even for free, using electricity generated by the roadway they were traveling. Gas stations would disappear, but not service stations. Cars and trucks would still require maintenance. We would just eliminate the carbon aspect of road travel, using non-petroleum lubricants, and electric vehicles. All biodegradeable or capable of being recycled. Being wellness oriented it would of course be cheaper, more efficient, and a much smaller footprint on the planet.
The first solar roadway. Credit: Solaroad

The first solar roadway.
Credit: Solaroad

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 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.”

 De Wit said in a statement that he didn’t “expect a yield as high as this so quickly.”

The 230-foot stretch of road, which is embedded with solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass, is built for bike traffic, a use that reflects the road’s environmentally-friendly message and the cycling-heavy […]

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