Solar Highways for the 21st Century
By Max Maxfield
This article was first published on EEWeb
Do you recall my column Solar highway provides a guiding light to the future? This column was about The Ray, which is an 18-mile stretch of Interstate 85 in Georgia (the part just as you are entering Georgia from Alabama) that serves as a testing ground for innovative and eco-friendly technologies. As I said in that column:
The public, private, philanthropic, partnership between The Ray, The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), the Georgia Department of Economic Development (GDEcD), and Private Industry has resulted in this first-of-its-kind project in the United States.
The idea behind The Ray is to employ state-owned facilities to provide a "living laboratory" that can be used to prove the business model for developing and testing innovative new technologies in the areas of renewable energy, highway safety, and sustainability.
Well, I just heard that The Ray and the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, are going to partner to create ground-breaking research in solar energy. Through this research, the Energy Institute will analyze United States interstate shoulder, known as rights-of-way, mile-by-mile, for solar energy generation potential.
