In El Paso, airport operations officials are planning to install solar-powered lighting in the facility’s long-term, overflow parking lot. In Oregon, highway officials are looking at highway verges and other adjacent spaces to install solar panels to power lights used at interchanges.

Both are initially test projects, with the one at El Paso’s International Airport being eventually extended to the rest of the airport’s parking lots, according to Jerry Bettendorf, assistant director of operations and security.

The cost of the pilot project in El Paso is estimated at about $330,000, or about 60 percent less than a standard lighting installation, according to estimates received by El Paso’s City Council. The solar lighting will also save the city an estimated $40,000 a year in electrical costs from El Paso Electric, an investor-owned utility whose electricity generation, in 2007, was primarily nuclear and natural gas.

Currently, the 2,200-space overflow parking section is being lit by a temporary system powered by diesel generators, but the purchase three years ago, of three solar-powered lights for the overflow lot’s entrance – lights which recently survived a lightning strike when all others failed – influenced planners to look toward solar power when upgrading the overflow lot’s lighting system.

Once budgeting is approved, the city plans to award the lighting contract to Palm City, Florida-based Sol Inc., a global provider of solar-powered and LED outdoor lighting solutions for commercial and institutional clients since 1990. Sol Inc. will deliver 100 light stands, each having two lights, a solar panel and two batteries that can together store up to five day’s worth of electricity.

The light stands will be installed by airport workers, with the purchase price being financed through revenues generated at the airport. Metal shade covers removed from the recent terminal renovation will also be used to create four to six shuttle-stop shelters in the overflow lot to serve airport passengers.

In Oregon, a 2008 pilot project which used 594 solar panels to provide about 25 percent of the energy needed to light the Interstate 5/Interstate 205 interchange in Tualatin, provided more than adequate proof that solar lighting can “complement, not compromise” the state’s network of highways.

In fact, the project was so successful that it inspired the nation’s largest solar highway-related project along southbound Interstate 205 in West Linn, which will reportedly feature up to 17,000 solar panels lining the highway’s right-of-way.

Surprisingly, the proposal by Oregon’s Department of Transportation, or ODOT, is being opposed by area environmentalists (and some NIMBYists as well), who charge that the solar installation will: require removing too many trees, and; result in regional utility Portland Gas & Electric, or PGE, buying the solar power at “green” rates and selling it back to ODOT at traditional rates (since ODOT is prohibited from buying power at green rates itself) – basically defeating the purpose of green power incentives.

Across the United States in general, the Green Roadway project, conceived by two inventors and based on 31 patents, aims to develop an “alternative energy roadway system” that could turn the nation’s highways into alternative energy generating platforms.

The last seems almost excessively ambitious, but then so did the transcontinental railroad in 1869. In all, these and other solar projects form the basis for a burgeoning solar energy industry that promises to deliver innovation to investors and lower solar energy prices to individual homeowners and small businesses – both welcome advances in a time when the economy seems to have stalled renewable energy in its traces.