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Italy Goes Solar With First Sun-Powered Road

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lame54 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 01:02 AM
Original message
Italy Goes Solar With First Sun-Powered Road
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/41988

From: Carlo Ombello
Published November 11, 2010 08:33 AM
Italy Goes Solar With First Sun-Powered Road

Most people will be surprised, but Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways. In fact, the A8 "Milano-Laghi" motorway ("Milan-Lakes", as it connects the city of Milan to Lake Como and Maggiore) was completed in 1926. Time has passed and all developed nations now boast wide motorway networks, a strategic infrastructure that helps interconnecting people, places and is ultimately essential to economic growth. But Italy will soon be able to claim a new "first": the A18 Catania-Siracusa motorway, a 30km addition to Sicily's 600km motorway network, will be a fully solar-powered motorway, the first in its kind.

Work is well underway to complete commissioning of this cutting edge infrastructure, which will be the most advanced motorway in Europe, including many outstanding features in terms of control systems, surveillance apparatus, tarmac quality, safety features (one of its new tunnels has also been awarded for its levels of safety). Construction activities are concluded, and a quarter of its solar photovoltaic (PV) panels were already operational by the end of September.

Pizzarotti & Co., the general contractor for this project, aims at having all of them online by early December (the panels are therefore feeding Sicily's electricity grid with clean energy even before it's used on site). Road testing is due in November, while on 1st January 2011 the Catania-Siracusa motorway will open to the public. By then, 100 percent of its electricity needs will be met by the PV panels installed along the road: 80 thousand of them. Lights, tunnel fans, road signs, emergency telephones, all the services and street furniture installed on the A18 will be run with solar power: distributed over a surface of 20 hectares, the photovoltaic array was obtained through the construction of 3 artificial tunnels on a 100m wide, 2.8km long stretch of road, a project with an overall cost of €60 million. Annual solar electricity production is estimated at about 12 million kWh, which will save — constructors claim — the equivalent of around 31 thousand tons of oil and 10 thousand tons worth of CO2 emissions every year.

The Catania-Siracusa motorway is one of the first experiments where a major infrastructure and distributed power generation are integrated in one design, surely the first at this scale. Furthermore, all the green areas involved in this project will be subject to a major environmental renovation scheme: the contractor provided for planting thousands of trees and plants, improving existing tree lines and hedges, increasing the extension of local woods. This however is not the first time renewable energy and sustainability are key to a road project in Italy. In the last few months, still in Sicily, solar panels for a total of 368 kWp where installed along the A20 Messina-Palermo: they now provide electricity for all the buildings located along the 183km motorway. A thousand km away in northern Italy, the A22 Brennero motorway (which crosses the Alps towards Austria) saw the installation of a soundproofing barrier along a residential area of the motorway route: the 1km long barrier is made of solar panels able to produce some 680,000 kWh per year, thus covering 20 percent of the local electricity needs.

Article continues: http://www.matternetwork.com/2010/11/italy-goes-solar-first-sun.cfm
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Better Today Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 01:15 AM
Response to Original message
1. Solar panel tunnels would be a great idea across some of our
desert highways and biways. They would provide much more comfortable shady respites to drive through, so good for drivers too. And, I think a lot of our electrical infrastructure runs near roadways, so most of the grid to hook up to is nearby. Since we don't have a lot of electrical needs on desert highways, I would think that they could be used to hook up to the grid and add power to whomever needs it.

Hell, it wouldn't even need to be a tunnel per se, it could just be high overhead providing shade and electricity.
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struggle4progress Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 01:46 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. Could be. But my memory of the roadsigns along the desert highways in rural CA and NV is
that they were riddled with bullet holes. So my guess is that our fine law-abiding armed citizens would go *plink*plink*plink* at the nice solar tunnels and they'd be ruined in no time
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Ghost Dog Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 02:58 AM
Response to Reply #3
5. Instal robot drones along the route
that would identify, fly out and shoot the shooters.
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Ghost Dog Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 02:59 AM
Response to Reply #1
6. To make the highway surface itself photovoltaic
would be very cool...
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Better Today Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 11:42 AM
Response to Reply #6
9. Not really, too much wear and tear and if it's not overhead it won't
have the advantage of offering travelers a shadier drive, using less AC, and hence less gas.
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muriel_volestrangler Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 11:43 AM
Response to Reply #6
10. There is a company researching that
Solar Roadways, and they've come up on DU more than once, eg http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7963025

My objection in there was their numbers are based on their solar panel roads lasting 3 times as long as asphalt roads. Which just doesn't seem feasible to me, unless they come up with new mechanical materials solutions, not just electrical.
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Odin2005 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 01:16 AM
Response to Original message
2. it's pretty sad when Italy is ahead of us.
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RandySF Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 02:10 AM
Response to Original message
4. Heathens
Didn't they hear from Shimkus that God will take care of Climate Change?
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jillan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 03:02 AM
Response to Original message
7. And the USA keeps moving further and further behind. That is awesome that Italy was able to
accomplish this.... just wish it was us.
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lame54 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-14-10 11:15 AM
Response to Original message
8. .
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