There are many approaches to combining the idea of bike paths and somehow adding solar panels into the mix. The Koreans thought it’d be a good idea to have a solar panel roof protecting a path in the middle of the highway, whereas a Dutch company thought it much better to use the panes as the riding surface.
They’ve recently announced that their solar path project is registering better than anticipated results…
If you haven’t heard of this interesting project, here’s the basic breakdown: called SolaRoad, the project opened the first operational solar-floor bike path in November of 2014. It used the equivalent of $3.7-million-worth of specially designed photovoltaic panels over a distance of 230 feet, or around 70 meters.
Now, Sten de Wit, a spokesman for SolaRoad was quited as saying:
“We did not expect a yield as high as this so quickly. The bike road opened half a year ago and already generated over 3,000 kWh. This can provide a single-person household with electricity for a year, or power an electric scooter to drive of 2.5 times around the world. If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70 kWh per square meter per year, which we predicted as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.”
It’s not a perfect idea, as it’s still far from covering the massive investment, but it’s also a testbed for future technologies.
The official press release points out that in the future, such roads could not only be used on a wider scale (and thus make more electricity that way) as well as to control traffic, melt snow and the control of self-driving cars. Once this connection is made, we could see this tech appear outside Holland, in places where self driving cars are the most prolific (Nevada, for instance).