France on Thursday inaugurated the world's first "solar
highway", a road paved with solar panels providing enough energy to power
the street lights of the small Normandy town of Tourouvre.
The one-kilometre (half-mile) "Wattway" covered
with 2,800 square metres (30,000 square feet) of resin-coated solar panels was
hooked up to the local power grid as Environment Minister Segolene Royal looked
on.
"This new use of solar energy takes advantage of large
swathes of road infrastructure already in use... to produce electricity without
taking up new real estate," Royal said in a statement.
The minister announced a four-year "plan for the
national deployment of solar highways" with initial projects in western
Brittany and southern Marseille.
An average of 2,000 cars use the road in Tourouvre each day,
testing the resistance of the panels for the project carried out by French
civil engineering firm Colas, a subsidiary of construction giant Bouygues.
The idea, which is also under exploration in Germany, the
Netherlands and the United States, is that roadways are occupied by cars only
around 20 percent of the time, providing vast expanses of surface to soak up
the sun's rays.
Colas says that in theory France could become energy
independent by paving only a quarter of its million kilometres of roads with
solar panels.
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