Several months have elapsed since I wrote about Solar Roadways, the brain-child of an electrical engineer named Scott Brusaw and his wife, Julie.
Years ago, Julie had the idea of building roads paved with solar panels that would both feed electricity into the local grid when the sun was shining, but which would also heat the road surface so snow would melt as it fell. She suggested that such specialized paving could also be used in places like parking lots, driveways, streets and open highways.
Scott chewed at the idea for years, fleshed it out, and began to look around for development money.
The Brusaws got two rounds of funding from the U.S. Highway Administration, and used it, in part, to build a small demonstration parking lot alongside the backyard shed that serves as their laboratory in their hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho.
But they needed more money, and launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding website. It caught the imagination of a lot of people and they raised $2.2 million, twice what they had hoped for.
Since then there has been a lot of planning done, but little in the way of publicity for their idea.
But when a bicycle path between two suburbs in Amsterdam, Holland, opened a few days ago, a lot of people were reminded of Solar Roadways, the Brusaws’ company. You see, the bike path is also paved with solar cells. And it’s called SolaRoad.
When the Brusaws started, they were thinking big. Scott was fond of saying that if you paved all of America’s roads with his solar panels, they would generate more power than the entire country uses. The developers of SolaRoad in the Netherlands, are starting small: a 70-metre length in one lane of an existing bike path, with a parallel lane alongside that will be used to for testing various solar technologies.
This is not to say that they might one day build a solar road; but like prudent researchers everywhere, they’re taking it one small step at a time.
The opening of SolaRoad also served as a reminder that people elsewhere are thinking of roads and solar energy together — but separate.
The state of Oregon started a few years ago with a 104-kilowatt project in the open spaces of a highway interchange near Portland. Then, in 2012, it developed a much larger 1.75-megawatt project on seven acres behind a nearby highway rest stop.
That one supplies 11 per cent of the state transportation department’s local offices. And planted in and around the solar panel are crops of corn and cabbages.
A third solar farm is being planned, again, in the vacant right-of-way that the state already owns along one of its highways.
All this is new stuff for North America, although Germany has had solar arrays along highway right-of-ways for years. And successes in Germany and Oregon have led the Minnesota transportation department to get into the act. After all, the state owns 250,000 acres of right-of-way that presently sit idle.
After several companies approached the department, expressing interest, the state decided to test the water by issuing a request for proposals, with a minimum project size of one megawatt, which it reckons will cover about an acre of land. From the RFP they expect to choose up to five sites for a pilot project.
The RFP has just closed, so the public hasn’t seen any of the proposals yet.
Now other people are starting to look at the thousands acres of land that lies within the right-of-ways of U.S. railways.
Nothing has come of that yet, as far as I know. But if the idea of building alongside roads takes off, you can be sure that building along rail lines will happen soon after.
In one shape or another, solar roads are likely to become a part of the world around us.
Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com.
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