Wattway will install 600 miles of solar roads in France

autoblog.com

A company in France is working with the national government there to undertake an enormous solar-energy road project. How many Renault electric vehicles it'll be able to power, we're not sure. But it will gin up enough power for a lot of homes.

French infrastructure firm Colas is working with INES (France's National Institute for Solar Energy) on what it calls the Wattway project. In a nutshell, Colas says it has a quarter-inch material that can be glued on top of highway pavement and is strong enough to handle trucks in heavy traffic. The stuff is made out of crystalline silicon, and Colas has been working on developing the product since 2009.

The upshot is that the collaboration is slated to cover about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) worth of roads with Wattway, and Colas says each kilometer of solar surface will supply enough juice to power 5,000 homes. That means those 620 miles could theoretically be good for about 3.1 million households. In other words, almost 10 percent of all the homes in France right there.