This futuristic road built in France is a fiasco, although it was expensive.
5 million euros for a single kilometer of road built, this small portion had everything to enter the record books but it will soon disappear for good… This road is located in France, in Normandy, in a town, Tourouvre-au-Perche, which received quite a spotlight about ten years ago. In 2016, departmental 5 which crossed it was chosen to serve as an open-air experiment for a completely new type of road: the solar road. It was in this small town in Orne with just over 3,000 inhabitants that 1,000 meters of bitumen had been covered with photovoltaic panels, making this departmental road the largest solar road in the world.
The objective at the time was simple: convert sunlight into electrical energy and show that ultimately this new model could replace power stations. After eight years of testing, the experimentation of the project, led at the time by Ségolène Royal, then Minister of the Environment, will end in the coming weeks with the dismantling of the solar road. And the results are not good, and even rather bad. Only two and a half years after the opening of this futuristic road, paved with 2,800m2 of solar panels, around a hundred meters too damaged to be repaired had been amputated. In 2024, the photograph of the places is unequivocal: certain panels, although protected by a particularly resistant protective resin, are detached from the road and the joints are falling apart.
The surface – which today only runs a few hundred meters – is certainly not made to withstand the daily passage of 2,000 vehicles including trucks and tractors. Not to mention that it generates a lot of noise to the point that the speed limit has been lowered to 70km/h on this portion of departmental 5 to relieve the ears of local residents. Above all, the investment for the construction of this solar road is not profitable. The State had spent 5 million euros on this little piece of road, and this is nothing compared to the amount spent by the Wattway company, which initiated the project.
The electricity production generated by the solar route was far too low to make the cost of the experiment profitable. This road of the future therefore has no future and will be completely destroyed soon, as was recently the concrete wall which bordered it to hide electrical equipment. In 2016, Ségolène Royal wanted 1,000 kilometers of solar roads to be built in France by 2020. Four years after the deadline, there will soon not be a single meter left.