Points of Interest | Green Energy News

October 19, 2003 – Vol.8 No.30

POINTS OF INTEREST.

A weekly collection of websites worth visiting.

Engineering exercise or cars of the future? You be the judge.

The Dutch solar car team has won the World Solar Challenge in record time - 1869 miles (3010 km) in 30 hours 54 minutes - an average of 60 miles per hour (97 kph).

The Nuna II, covered with triple-junction solar cells and an energy storage pack of lithium batteries, also won the race from Darwin to Adelaide, Australia in 2001 but was improved this year with better aerodynamics.

There were 22 entries in the 2003 race. Australia’s Aurora took second, Tesseract from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took third. http[ ://www.wsc.org.au/ , (Nuna II) http://www.nuonsolarteam.com/ (Aurora) http://www.aurasolarcar.com/ (Tesseract) http://www.mit.edu/activities/solar-cars

The mainstream news reports said it was the first new way to generate electricity in 150 years. But scientists at the University of Alberta played down their discovery saying it could only be used for micro-electronics and its efficiency is less than one percent.

Still the idea that by running water through microchannels could generate enough electricity to power a small light bulb is exciting. Others are already saying salt water would work better. University of Alberta (news) http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/expressnews/ (click Archives), Institute of Physics http://www.iop.org/