Paving the way toward solar-powered roads

French firm Colas eyes test sites in North America, including Calgary

It puts a whole new spin on Eddy Grant’s 1982 chart-topper Electric Avenue.

French infrastructure firm Colas has begun building a test road in a Normandy village that’s surfaced with rugged solar panels.

Colas says the panels can withstand the weight of a tractor-trailer unit, while the 2,800-square-meter, one-kilometer-long test site in France can generate a peak output of 280 kilowatts—enough power to provide public lighting for a town of 5,000 for a year.

“We wanted to find a second life for a road,” Philippe Harelle, a technology official with Colas, tells Bloomberg News. “Solar farms use land that could otherwise be for agriculture, while the roads are free.”

Far from free, actually. The cost of these panels, encased in several layers of durable plastic and coated with skidproof crushed glass, is currently US$2,100 per square meter, including installation, monitoring and data collection.

Still, the cost of solar technology is gradually dropping, and the manufacturer believes this “solar road” concept will have a price point that’s competitive with traditional solar farms by 2020.

Colas has designs on building a 1,000-km solar panel road through France, known as Wattway, over the next five years. The Wattway concept, developed in partnership with the French National Institute of Solar Energy, won a climate solutions award earlier this year during the COP21 United Nations Climate Change conference in Paris.

In the meantime, the company plans to build two more test sites in North America—one in Calgary, the other near Atlanta—as well as Africa, Japan and throughout the European Union.

“We’re seeing solar get integrated in a number of things—from windows in buildings to rooftops of cars—made possible by the falling cost of panels,” remarks Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Pietro Radoia.

“On roads, I don’t think that it will really take off unless there’s a shortage of land sometime in the future.”

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