Mirror, mirror on the hill
The town of Rattenberg, Austria, was built on the not-so-sunny side of Rat Mountain. The 3,000 foot hill blocks sunlight to the 440 residents until February. So they’re mounting rotating mirrors known as heliostats on the hillside to grab sunshine off reflectors from the nearby village of Kramsach. And who’s funding this ridiculous project, we are..!
It’s costly, however. The European Union is footing half the $2.4 million bill, and the company says it will pay the $600,000 cost of planning the project, gambling that success will attract more business. In the Tyrol region of the Alps alone, about 60 communities suffer the same fate in winter as Rattenberg. Peskoller says about six other towns in Austria and neighboring Switzerland have expressed interest.
[...]But it would take a mirror the size of a football field to light up all of Rattenberg, “and we cannot cover the mountain with mirrors to bathe the whole town in light,” he says. So Lichtlabor plans to create about a dozen “hotspots”  areas not much bigger than a front yard scattered through the town, where people can gather and soak up rays. The mirrors would also reflect at various times of day onto building facades to show daylight slowly turning to dusk.
