We are all aware of solar powered products such as Solar Street Lights, Smart Solar Benches and Home Solar Kits. EnGoPlanet is working hard to deploy Solar Power further.
Faced with this government subsidy cuts, solar developers have started to focus on ways to generate power directly for consumption, rather than exporting it to the grid. With the right customers, solar developers can offer lower tariffs than the grid, while still earning more for their power than they would get from exporting it.
Solar giant Lightsource, for example, recently signed a 25 year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Belfast airport that underwrote a neighboring £5m solar farm, using a private wire to supply a quarter of the airport’s electricity needs.
Solar powered electric trains
As an industrial client with high on-site daytime energy use and a structural reason to stay put, Network Rail has all the features needed to support this kind of approach.
Electric trains are by far the best long-distance transport mode when it comes to carbon emissions - at least when their electricity comes from renewable sources like solar or wind.
We have the example of UK’s ageing power network poses a significant challenge to any bid to decarbonize road and rail that relies on the grid. There are now swathes of the British countryside where it is impossible to plug in any new solar, wind or hydropower without being hit with a whopping bill for the full costs of local network reinforcement.
For instance, analysts have identified inadequate distribution and transmission infrastructure as a key obstacle to realizing India’s aggressive target of 100GW of solar PV capacity by 2022. But India already has over 25,000km of electrified tracks, and an electrification target of 2,000km of new tracks every year.
Solar aviation
Airplane Solar Impulse 2 has completed the first ever round the world flight. The Solar Impulse 2 has a 72m wingspan, wider than a Boeing 747, and carries over 17,000 solar cells.
Solar panel road
France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.
A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels.
It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents.
In 2014, a solar-powered cycle path opened in Krommenie in the Netherlands and, despite teething problems, has generated 3,000kWh of energy - enough to power an average family home for a year. The cost of building the cycle path, however, could have paid for 520,000kWh.
We at EnGoPlanet are eager to welcome all new products that will use solar power and enhance sustainability.