Last month an airplane known as Solar Impulse completed a fully solar-powered flight across the USA as a demonstration of current solar solutions. In the video above you can see why they made the flight and how the Switezerland-based company wants to change air travel.
At the Guardian there is an article on the flight plus other up and coming solar powered vehicles that we will hopefully see all over. The faster we reduce our global fossil fuel consumption the faster we can improve our planet and our economy.
Its solar cells are 135 microns thin – the same as a human hair; its motors waste only 6% of the energy they consume, compared with a typical bleed of 70%; its carbon fibre panels that form the structure of the wings and fuselage are, at 25g/m squared, three times lighter than writing paper. The new plane, the HB-SIB, can fly through night and day, clear skies and storms, at a top speed of 70km an hour. “We built the first plane with the technology of 2007,” Piccard says. “We built the second plane with the technology of 2015.”
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Piccard sums it up: “The goal is to change the mindset of people through Solar Impulse. If a plane can fly around the world with no fuel, nobody can say that we cannot reach incredible goals with clean technology. You have a lot of resistance to change, a lot of people saying, ‘I don’t believe in that’ because of dogma. They are afraid of change and they are not pioneers.