WATTWAY; France Will Pave Roads With 620 Miles Of Solar Panels

Colas Wattway road-mounted solar panels

Thanks to a steep drop in the price of photovoltaic cells, you're more likely to see solar panels on buildings as you drive along.
But what if one day you drove on those solar panels as well?
Embedding solar panels in roadways has been proposed before, but the French government may be about to take the most ambitious step toward that goal yet.

The country's environment agency plans to resurface 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of roads with solar panels, according to Australian car site Motoring.
Those roads will use a purpose-built solar panel called Wattway, developed by road-building company Colas in partnership with the French National Solar Energy Institute.
Colas claims the Wattway panels can be directly applied to an existing road surface, and will provide comparable levels of grip to conventional paving materials.

Colas Wattway road-mounted solar panels

And while the panels are just 7 millimeters thick, Colas claims they can stand up to the wear and tear of heavy vehicles being driven over them continuously. If the Wattway-paved roads really do pass that durability test, Colas claims they will provide ample power.
Four meters (13 feet) of road can provide enough electricity to power the average French house (excluding heating), the company says.

But only real-world use can verify those claims.
One disadvantage of solar panels laid flat on a roadway is that they can't harvest as much energy as angled, roof-mounted panels.
Wattway is undergoing final trials. If all goes well, the full 621 miles of panels will be laid over the next few months.

Colas Wattway road-mounted solar panels

Colas and the French government aren't alone in pursuing the dream of solar roads. A Dutch company called SolaRoad began laying solar panels on a bike path near Amsterdam last year, to test technology it hopes will eventually be applied to roadways.
And in the U.S., there's Solar Roadways, which became widely known through a successful crowd-funding campaign, and is now refining its own designs.

In November 2015, Solar Roadways was awarded a two-year, $750,000 Small Business Innovative Research contract by the U.S. Department of Transportation to conduct additional tests on its panels.
All of these companies have one thing in common: a goal to use roads as a source of renewable power for everything from nearby streetlights, to buildings.
Whether any of these projects survives to achieve that goal remains to be seen.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1102399_france-will-pave-roads-with-620-miles-of-solar-panels

Dutch plan to charge car drivers by the kilometre

Published: Tuesday 17 November 2009

Dutch drivers will be first in Europe to start paying according to the kilometres they drive rather than for owning a car, if a legislative proposal submitted to the lower house of the country's parliament on Friday (14 November) goes through.

The kilometre charge would replace road tax and purchase tax in 2012. The idea is to cut CO2 emissions while halving traffic jams in what is one of Europe's most congested road networks.

The transport ministry expects the number of kilometres travelled to drop by 15% as the charge on the distance driven will lead people to opt more readily for public transport. This would reduce carbon and fine particle emissions by over 10%, it estimates.

The amount of the tariff will depend on the CO2 emissions produced by a passenger car, or on weight for other vehicles. Certain vehicles like taxis, buses and motorcycles will be exempt from the charge, while an alternative system will be set up for foreign vehicles.

A driver of a standard car would initially be charged three cents per kilometre, increasing to 6.7 cents in 2018, according to the proposed law. Legislation introducing rush-hour surcharges specific to a location could be introduced later on, the Ministry of Transport said.

The kilometres will be tracked with a GPS device to be installed in every vehicle. This will record each journey and send the information to a billing agency.

Nevertheless, most people will end up paying less, as the charge will not exceed current taxes and the abolition of the purchase tax will slash a quarter off a car's price, the ministry argues. All the revenue collected from the charge would go directly to building roads, railways and other transport infrastructure.

The kilometre charge has been hotly debated for years due to privacy concerns, but the transport ministry offered assurances that information sent via the GPS would be "legally and tecnically protected".

"The authorities will not have access to any journey details and will not be able to track any vehicles. So the privacy of road users will be guaranteed," it said in a statement.

But environmentalists argued that future transport IT to help cut emissions will ultimately not be any more invasive than the ability to send a text via mobile phone.

"People will worry that the system heralds the arrival of Big Brother, but our mobile phone handsets already double as a highly-effective means of tracking our movements," said the UK Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

EurActiv