In the near future, your daily self-care stroll could help the place you call home achieve energy resilience and independence by powering traffic lights and streetlights… and lots of other things. Instead of treading on dirty, gum-covered pavement, you’ll be traveling with purpose on what’s known as a solar sidewalk. These feats of engineering wonder are now being planned into projects by city planners, and places all over the globe are trying it out.

In Tampa, Florida, city officials teamed up with Canadian solar solutions company Solar Earth Technologies on a solar sidewalk pilot project. As residents use the new sidewalk (this particular project is at a single intersection) researchers monitor for the feasibility of foot-traffic-powered lights, security cameras, public wi-fi, electric vehicles, EV charging stations, and public art displays at scale. Other projects are in the works… could be the beginning of something special.

These sidewalks are made of solar panels that don’t just use sunlight to make power, they use the energy generated when people walk on them. Think of all the stuff around sidewalks in need of energy… it almost seems like a no-brainer. Not only that, solar sidewalks can help reduce temperatures in cities by reducing the amount of heat absorbed into the ground. Remember the melting infrastructure stories from last summer’s heat waves? It’s why this matters.

Recently, as part of the “Making City” European Union project (designed to develop and test innovative tech), the Dutch city of Groningen installed a solar footpath to generate 55,000 kWh of electricity a year that can withstand a pressure of two tons without microcracks, which can weaken the material. For context, the typical American household only uses about 11,000 kWh per year, and holding up under that pressure is like standing under an adult elephant without flinching.

Best of all, these solar sidewalks could end up part of a much larger, important system… the US Department of Energy (DOE) has partnered with Solar Roadways to look into using their solar panel technology for roads. The company was awarded a Phase I SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) contract by the USDOT to see if it would be possible for us to create highway systems that pay for themselves through renewable energy. That means cutting the strings of dependency.

Some solar sidewalk perks seem obvious to us… like severing reliance on fossil fuels, creating jobs (we’ll need guys who know how to install this stuff), and reduced energy bills (paid by our tax dollars). Some things, though, are less obvious. For instance, with the weather getting wilder, having sidewalks that help power cities and roads means we don’t have total blackouts. Or something as simple as roads that prevent wrecks by melting ice.

Demand is growing… while it’s not easy to pin down exact numbers just yet, figures point to a market in the billions, which makes sense given it’s part of a larger, growing solar market. In fact, it seems like people are almost downright demanding solar at this point. And, it’s getting cheaper… and governments are pairing up with the private sector to launch pilot projects, new incentives are pushing sales, smart cities will ideally have solar sidewalks by default… we see a picture forming.

Aside from the cold, hard numbers, and after the practicality, we can’t forget to touch the human element of solar sidewalks. Some folks see these innovations as a path toward independence and self-sufficiency for their communities. This is a growing trend that we’re seeing… one such group of folks is the Malahat First Nation. They’re working on solar panels embedded in pavement to power their goal of energy self-sufficiency by 2030.

Finally, while we’ve all gotten used to centralized energy, that model is falling out of prominence and becoming more of a single piece of an overall power strategy. This strategy being made up of all kinds of energy-creating devices all around us, all the time (even us). We think it’s both appropriate and practical, given the chaos of the weather, political tensions, and the crumbling of ill-maintained energy infrastructure. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the green tech space.