A road covered in a layer of thin solar panels that can help power homes and offices is to be built in the UK next year.
The quarter-inch photovoltaic material can be glued on top of a traditional road surface and is tough enough to withstand lorries driving over it, according to the engineers behind the scheme.
Colas, a subsidiary of the French engineering firm Bouygues, is planning to test its Wattway solar road at up to three trial sites in the UK. One of the locations is likely to be near Cambridge.
In areas with 1,000 hours of sunshine a year, just 12ft of road surface can provide enough electricity to power the lights and electrical appliances of one home. Cambridge averages about 1,500 hours of sunshine a year.
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8 comments:
How do you fill in the pot holes?
I've been waiting and hoping for this to happen.
I would love to hear how this works out.
Enough to power 1 home? This will be cost effective!
This has already been tried and 85% of the panels were broken in the first month.
This is just another way to waste hard-working taxpayers money.
Might be slick as ice!
What happens when the snowplows scrape them up?
Salisbury can't even put in an asphalt road properly, I'd hate to see what they do with a solar road.
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