The environmentally friendly Dutch are leaders on all things bike related, and now they have raised their bike riding eco-credentials with new paths that generate electricity from the sun.
Two new cycleways in the provinces of North Holland and North Brabant bear a photovoltaic coating capable of generating 148 watts of solar power per square metre.
Each bike path covers 1000 square metres and features solar panels encased in resin that will endure wear and tear. The hope is that the bike paths will produce 160 megawatt-hours of renewable energy in the first year to feed into the Dutch grid.
As countries make the shift towards renewable forms of energy, some make use of sprawling residential developments through rooftop solar, and others build massive solar farms in the desert.
A series of similar pilot projects are in place in the Netherlands, where researchers have experimented with solar bike paths since 2014.
The massive network of 35,000km of bike paths in the Netherlands is giving authorities a lot of surface area to work with.
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