A road powered by solar energy: it's happening in Peachtree Corners, a small town in Georgia, which has described it as “the first solar road in the United States.”
Green light for the first solar road in the United States. The initiative comes from the administration of Peachtree Corners, in the metropolitan area of Atlanta: the aim is to expand the areas of application of the panels to power other infrastructure. In the small American town, located in Gwinnett County, the local administration has installed solar panels on the road running through its technology district and the Curiosity Lab, which also serves as a test track for self-driving cars. The panels were supplied by Colas group, a French company that had previously explained that the Wattway type can be applied directly to the road surface, without any additional adaptation works, with grip levels comparable to conventional paving.
A solar road whose panels will be able to produce more than 1,300 kWh of electricity per year — energy that will be used for the level 2 electric vehicle charging stations installed in front of the town hall: a virtuous circle that will allow electric car owners to charge for free during night-time hours. Also collaborating on the project is The Ray, an organisation that has approximately 30 kilometres of Georgia's Interstate 85 at its disposal to test new technologies in the areas of safety and emissions reduction, and which has already tested the panels for installation on a section of motorway.
"This new form of 100 per cent green renewable energy will begin by supplying power to an electric vehicle charging station," explained Brandon Branham, Assistant city manager of Peachtree Corners, "but the initiative is part of a broader vision — that of beginning to power more infrastructure throughout the city, off-grid. We look forward to installing more panels, including pavements, cycle paths and many other surfaces."
"Our organisation, with the help of various partners, is committed to advancing the future of transport infrastructure around the world," added Harrier Anderson Langfrod, founder and president of The Ray. "We have had great success using both state roads and unused interstate highways to generate large amounts of electricity for electric vehicles. Applying this technology to an environment like Peachtree Corners helps us further demonstrate its effectiveness, pushing us towards implementation on a larger scale."
This is not the first time solar road panels have been discussed, with various different applications. On the one hand, roads or infrastructure that power themselves through solar panels have indeed become commonplace: one example is the Ponte San Giorgio in Genoa, built on the rubble of the Ponte Morandi. Solar panels have been installed along the route of the new bridge designed by Renzo Piano, powering both the lighting and the robots responsible for cleaning the panels themselves and monitoring the bridge's condition as they run along the rails fitted beneath the deck.
The other application of solar panels on roads is, precisely, that of solar roads — stretches of road of varying size covered with panels to harvest energy. And in this considerably more complex field, the results have not always lived up to expectations. Consider the French experiment of 2016: around 2,800 square metres of photovoltaic panels were installed along one kilometre of the departmental road leading to the small town of Tourouvre-au-Perche, in the Orne. Renamed Wattway, it was supposed to extend over 1,000 kilometres, but maintenance proved too costly and, compounded by weather conditions and the passage of heavy vehicles, the panels wore out.
The "solar road" experiment did, however, succeed in China, where in 2018 the first solar motorway was inaugurated in the province of Shandong, near the provincial capital Jinan. The Qilu Transportation development group repaved one initial kilometre of the expressway surrounding the city with solar panels, covering a total of 5,875 square metres capable of producing 1 million kWh per year: enough energy to meet the needs of 800 Chinese families.
The true pioneer in this respect was, however, the Netherlands, which as early as 2015 had installed a particular type of concentrating photovoltaic noise barrier on the A2 motorway, near Den Bosch, capable of generating energy.
