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Sun Powers Plane from Switzerland to Spain to Morocco

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June 05, 2012

Sun Powers Plane from Switzerland to Spain to Morocco

By Colleen Lynch
TMCnet Contributor

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Though it’s hard to imagine a time before airplanes, it might be even harder to imagine a time when an airplane could fly across continents powered by the sun. Well put your imaginations to work because that time is now. An experimental plane from the company Solar Impulse is currently on its way from Madrid to Morocco. The trip is the last leg of its journey from Switzerland to Africa, which in total covers 2,500 kilometers (1,554 miles).


The journey is the single-seat aircraft’s first transcontinental flight, as well as a final dress rehearsal for the planned round-the-world flight set to take off in 2014 with an improved plane. The aircraft is reportedly the size of a jumbo jet, and is fitted with 12,000 solar panels. In a statement released Tuesday, organizers named the Moroccan capital Rabat to be the plane’s end-point late Tuesday night. The plane took off from Spain before dawn Tuesday morning.

The plane’s journey is not a cheap one—the project to get the solar-powered plane off the ground and running cost an estimated $100 million over the last ten years. It began in 2003, just when solar power was becoming an actuality, and today the technology is steadily gaining popularity across the globe. The use of sunlight to create electricity is employed by people looking to cut costs, as well as those with an environmental awareness.

Solar power can be created in a number of ways, including the use of solar panels or photovoltaics (PV), or concentrated solar power (CSP (News - Alert)), which uses lenses or mirrors to focus light beams and create heat, which in turn gets connected to a power generator. The Solar Impulse plane has the 12,000 solar cells fitted in its wings which turn four electrical motors, all of which charge lithium polymer batteries during the day to enable flight after dark.

This voyage was timed to coincide with the launch of construction on the largest-ever solar thermal plant in southern Morocco, but the goal is to encourage the expansion of solar power technology throughout the world.  

In the United States alone, solar power use is reaching unprecedented levels. A new study released by GTM Research expects the current $1 billion market to reach $8 billion by 2015, as more small power devices and even entire homes are making a change to solar power.  

The industry has become the fastest-growing electric source in the United States as of last year, according to a report by the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA), and the innovative technology is gaining traction worldwide. Petra Solar announced on May 21 that it will deploy a five-megawatt (MW) grid-tied PV solar plant in the Kingdom of Bahrain off the Persian Gulf, the first project of its kind in the region. Guatam Polymers, in India, is looking to solve substantial power problems throughout the country with its new Solid Solar panels, and researchers in Iran have received a U.S. patent for their work in restructuring of solar cells.

Word is catching on, and the innovation offered by solar power is catching flight. Bertrand Piccard, the 54-year-old psychiatrist and balloonist, who manned the Solar Impulse plane for the second leg of its trip, said the flight was envisioned as a way “to demonstrate that we can achieve incredible goals, almost impossible goals with new technologies, without fuel, just with solar energy, and raise awareness that if we can do it in the air of course everybody can do it on the ground.”

The flight is available to watch in real-time on the Solar Impulse website.




Edited by Brooke Neuman

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