Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Cars in France are now tootling along the world’s first solar panel road

Trevor Mogg
By

solar panel road france
Colas
Take a drive through northern France from this week and you may find yourself tootling along what’s said to be the world’s first solar panel road.

Opened in the Normandy village of Tourouvre-au-Perche on Thursday, the 1-kilometer (0.62 mile) stretch of road is covered with 30,000 square feet of solar panels hooked up to power local street lights.

Recommended Videos

The electricity-generating road, called Wattway, wasn’t cheap to construct, however, costing the state a whopping €5 million (about $5.2m).

Related

The unique stretch of road was built by French civil engineering firm Colas, which, according to the Guardian, is currently working on around 100 similar projects in a number of countries around the world.

Wattway is part of a broader five-year plan announced by the French government at the start of 2016 to pave 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of roads with photovoltaic panels. Ségolène Royal, France’s minister of ecology and energy, said that if its entire network of solar roads proves successful, it’ll generate enough power to provide up to five million people with electricity.

But whether the project will ultimately triumph is the big question. Critics point to the huge costs of installing such technology, though that may reduce over time. Also, with the panels laying flat on the road, they’re not as effective as those found on houses or in vast solar farms, which are angled for maximum efficiency.

The road’s durability will also come under scrutiny, with all kinds of vehicles and all kinds of weather testing it to the limit, though Colas says the panels have been strengthened with silicon-based resin to ensure their longevity.

A similar feature opened in the Netherlands in 2014, though that one was designed for cyclists instead of cars. After a year of use, the 70-meter bike path was deemed a success, achieving its goal of generating enough electricity to keep three homes powered. Designed by consortium SolaRoad in partnership with the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, the path did, however, experience some problems, with harsh weather causing the top part of some of the panels to break off. Engineers have since sorted out the issue.

Still, the overriding challenge appears to be cost, and until a way can be found to significantly reduce the price of the technology, the appearance of miles and miles of solar panel roads may still be a ways off.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
InSight’s solar panels get a spring cleaning from Martian winds
insight solar panels wind pia23203 main slider after 16 1

A selfie snapped by NASA's InSight lander. You can see a layer of brown dust that has settled on the spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Winds on Mars might have caused the ultimate demise of the Opportunity rover, but they could also help extend the life of the InSight mission. The same winds that blow dust onto spacecrafts' solar panels can also blow that dust away, so scientists are now studying the way wind affects InSight's power generation.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more