How Solar is Spreading to Unexpected Places

Following up on our post on ‘How Solar Becomes an Energy Revolution‘, some new developments place solar energy generation in new promising locations: roads!

Installing a pilot solar generation cycle path in the Netherlands

This post on Quartz summarizes this development: ‘The day when roads will harness solar energy is drawing near‘, with loads of interesting links.

This is an obvious choice – everybody knows how asphalt roads can become substantially hot as soon as the sun shines! Some technological challenges need to be overcome, but that could be a decisive usage of public space for energy generation.

At the same time we note that a number of large solar farms projects are also spreading in many countries, including France (the image is from a project in the Alps mountains). These are huge areas covered with solar panels and can generate up to 100MW. Expect a few of these fields to develop too in the very near future, changing landscapes!