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Powered by hot roads The Gainesville Sun/Associated Press, January 1, 2008 "A Dutch company is now siphoning heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices. 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 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet 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." http://www.gainesvillesun.com/article/20080101/NEWS/801010317 -- ********************************************************************** Dr. Ann C. Wilkie Tel: (352)392-8699 Soil and Water Science Department Fax: (352)392-7008 University of Florida-IFAS P.O. Box 110960 E-mail: [log in to unmask] Gainesville, FL 32611-0960 ______________________________________________________________________ Campus location: Environmental Microbiology Laboratory (Bldg. 246). http://campusmap.ufl.edu/ ______________________________________________________________________ BioEnergy and Sustainable Technology Society http://grove.ufl.edu/~bests/ **********************************************************************