The French Government is undeterred by the criticisms being hurled upon for its solar road technology project. A one kilometer stretch in the small Normandy village of Tourouvre-au-Perche has been built with solar panels. As per official estimates, the road will be used by 2,000 motorists per day on average. It will produce enough energy to power the city's streetlights.

The Government had announced in February that it will pave 621 miles (1,000 km) of road with solar panels over the next five years. It has kept its promise and has laid the first one kilometer. The next trials will be conducted in 2017 possibly on a section of Brittany's Route 164 and in the Marseille Fos port, reports Forbes.

French Minister for Environment, Ségolène Royal, has confirmed the trials to be conducted next year. However, everyone's not happy as the limited outcome hardly seems to justify the five million dollars spent on the project. Economists have pointed out that rooftop panels are at least 13 times cheaper than the photovoltaic road surface, also known as Wattway cells, per kilowatt peak.

Even though Royal and Colas, the company that has developed these Wattway cells, strongly believe that costs will go down significantly as the technology becomes more widespread, many think otherwise. Vice-president of the French Network for Energetic Transition, Marc Jedliczka, has dubbed the experiment more like a "gadget" and an "engineering feat" than a sustainable source for producing energy.

On the other hand, Royal has pointed out how this new way of utilizing solar energy does not need any sort of civil engineering work. It produces energy without exhausting new real estate.

The Wattway cells simply take advantage of the large swatches of road infrastructure already in use. As per ARS Technica, solar panels' questionable efficiency and cost problems are big reasons why more solar roads are not being built currently.