7th World Solar Challenge Underway

downundarob writes "At around 200310182230 UTC the World Solar Challenge will leave the start line. Entrants will traverse more than 3,000km of the Australian continent from tropical Darwin to balmy Adelaide, in cars powered by nothing more than the sun. One of the unique propositions of the World Solar Challenge is that it is run in one stage. Once competitors have left Darwin at 8am on the first day, they are on their own. Apart from compulsory stops at the seven checkpoints, each team endeavours to travel as far as it can each day, but must make camp by 5pm each evening."

Comments

Just goes to show..

[adeyadey]

Proving that solar (and other alterntives) have come on leaps and bounds in the last decade or so. Why do we still persist with nuclear, oil, coal, with all the attendant problems (pollution, wars over oil, etc), when we could cover a small proportiion of the deserts of the world with solar cells, and the roofs of our buildings, and the coasts with huge offsiore wind farms & tidal turbines, and have all the power we need?

Re:Solar cars.

[adeyadey]

..Expense.

Solar power has evolved massively in the last decade or so, but the sort of very-high-efficiency cells used here - and they have to be because of the small surface area - are still very expensive, they need "chip grade" silicon. What is more cost effective for stationary generators are amorphous cells - much lower efficiency, but potentially very cheap to make. If you could get the efficiency of these cells up then you could have genuine solar/electic combo transport. Oh you need cheap, light batteries too, another technology that is evolving quickly - look at mobile phones..

As a supplementary charger there may be some value to solar in a car, but at the moment not as the prime source for a full sized/weight car or truck. You need to get some power from elsewhere..

Re:Camp?

[duncf]

Hardly seems that they are totally on there own if they have to make camp by 5.

Teams drive from 8 to 5 -- that's 9 hours, they don't stop. Fatigue gets to be a real issue, if there were no rules, there's a very large possibility that drivers (and passengers) would end up with severe dehydration, or, even more likely, cause an accident. It's usually at least 40 degrees Celsius inside the cars.

Here's the point:

[shadow_slicer]

Activities like this may not extend mankind's knowledge about solar power, but they are useful.

Parent made an excellent point, apparently without realizing it:

"all it does is give universities with lots of money the ability to build super lite cars that run on solor power"

Activities like this give aspiring engineers of various disciplines an opportunity to work on a large project. In engineering fields, work experience on large projects is invaluable.

Also, activities like this expose many of the people who would be designing the cars/power plants/??? of the future to solar power.

In that sense, these activities are more important than the X-prize (or "S-Prize"), because it exposes people to these technologies, making them more comfortable using them in the future. It doesn't matter if you have a 98% efficient solar panel costing $1/MW, if no one in design is willing to risk using it.

As the parent implied, solar tech is not ready yet, but I maintain that in preparation for the future when the technology IS ready, activities like these are needed to allow for more rapid adoption.