American Solar Challenge Racers Head For Canada

coondoggie writes "Solar race cars this week began their nine-day, 2,400 mile chase from Dallas to Calgary, Alberta using only the sun for fuel. The 24 teams in the American Solar Challenge race are mainly US college teams including entries from MIT, Ohio State and Northwestern. The University of Michigan's Continuum car is the defending champ, having won the Challenge in Australia last year. The University of Michigan has won four out of the eight North American Solar Challenges it has entered with its team of more than 100 engineering students, who have vowed to defend their title this year."

Comments

The right kind of innovation?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I'm not sure that solar racing really showcases the right kinds of innovation. The winners tend to be those with the most efficient (and expensive) PV technology. Having the PV labs focus so much effort on expensive PV does not really help deployment of PV as a practical real world solution.

The most important consideration in making PV practical is to reduce $perW. Who cares about efficiency as a goal of itself? If someone was to make 10% efficient roofing tiles at low $perW then you could make a whole roof out of them.

Research really needs to shift more towards $perW.