Solar Carparks
A 10 megawatt photovoltaic carport system is being built at the North Park offices of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran and is expected to be finished and connected to the public grid by the end of 2011. I believe it will be the world’s largest solar carport system? Read about it at PV Magazine.
You can also find more news about solar carparks around the world here.
Solar Roadways
This is old news, but it’s awesome eco-techie news, so obviously it deserves a place in this blog! The Federal Highway Administration commissioned Solar Roadways to build a solar road prototype in 2009, and they just completed it in February.
Here’s a taste of the good future:
“In addition to the prototype Solar Road Panel and the prototype stormwater redistribution system, we built a 3′ by 3′ crosswalk panel. We don’t really discuss it, but in the video, you’ll see two children run onto the crosswalk panel. The crosswalk panel contains embedded load cells to determine when a weight (such as a pedestrian or some form of wildlife) is on its surface. The crosswalk panel begins to flash when a weight is detected. It also sends a signal to the Solar Road Panel, which instructs the oncoming drivers to “SLOW DOWN”. This demonstrates the ability of the road panels to communicate with one another along with any drivers traveling across their surfaces.”
You can check out their brilliant videos, pictures, and information here.
EXPERIMENTS IN LOW-IMPACT EATING 