Road to solar power runs through hot tarmac
If you have ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know how asphalt absorbs the sun’s rays. Now, a Dutch company is siphoning the heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.
By Agencies |
SCHARWOUDE, NETHERLANDS: If you have ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know how asphalt absorbs the sun’s rays. Now, a Dutch company is siphoning the heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices. As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by the civil engineering firm, Ooms Avenhorn Holding, does not look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when it was first conceived.
Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 sq ft in the city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 sq ft of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.
And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.
The road energy system is one of the more unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy radiating to earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.
Solar advocates say that will change within a few years. Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land needed for food crops.
“But solar falls everywhere,” says Patrick Mazza, of Climate Solutions, a consultancy group in Washington. Compared with other energy sources, “solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It’s the one we really need to get at,” he said. Ooms’ thermal energy system is too expensive and inefficient to solve the world’s energy problems. In fact, it was actually a spin-off of a method to reduce road maintenance.
Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 sq ft in the city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 sq ft of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.
And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.
The road energy system is one of the more unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy radiating to earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.
Solar advocates say that will change within a few years. Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land needed for food crops.
“But solar falls everywhere,” says Patrick Mazza, of Climate Solutions, a consultancy group in Washington. Compared with other energy sources, “solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It’s the one we really need to get at,” he said. Ooms’ thermal energy system is too expensive and inefficient to solve the world’s energy problems. In fact, it was actually a spin-off of a method to reduce road maintenance.
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