This year, three supercar manufacturers all produced incredibly powerful, hybrid sportscars which rely on electrical motors to provide an extra boost of power.
Like all high performance cars though, weight is a major consideration towards almost every facet of the engineering on the cars and a large number of heavy batteries are not a practical solution for anyone. While the Porsche 918 and the McLaren P1 can be plugged in to get charged up, whereas the Ferrari LaFerrari is purely a hybrid, they all use various methods for harvesting energy back and using it to keep the smaller battery pack charged. They generate energy from the brakes, the powertrain (when on partial throttle settings or to aid deceleration) and feed it back into the system to give unprecedented acceleration.
This power microgeneration is an incredibly useful system to recover energy that would otherwise go to waste, saving each little scrap so that the sum total, in a very short amount of time is enough to propel a hypercar to 200mph and beyond.
The concept of microgeneration is particularly appropriate to power generation over an entire country. For a relatively densely populated nation such as the UK it is difficult to justify the use of large expanses of the countryside to solar and wind power or to inundate a valley behind a hydroelectric dam. In hot countries like India, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel a huge number of homes have a solar water heater, reducing the national power consumption and carbon footprint dramatically as well as making the domestic electricity bill of the houses dramatically less. In Israel, a country with a population of only about 7 million (Greater London has a population of 10 million) the use of the solar water heaters invented there is estimated to save the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil a year. In the winter an auxiliary heating element can be used but even on cooler, duller days the solar heater can still be surprisingly effective.
Solar water heaters on homes and apartment buildings in Israel
The government is looking to change tact over solar power in precisely this way and the recent proposal to limit subsidies to large solar farms means that those in the UK are going to have to compete with other renewable sources if they have installations bigger than 5 megawatts. There are currently enough photovoltaic installed capacity to power 620,000 houses, only 2.3% of the homes in the UK. The cost of solar products in the UK has dropped in the last 4 years so there's no way for the government to get the subsidy back and the new, preferred direction is to start putting solar panels on buildings instead of fields. In this way, farmers can grow their crops in the fields and they will still stay green while the existing, unused roof space gets used more efficiently.
The US are thinking in a similar direction on this subject with President Obama now introducing a significant solar project for the White House and many other federal buildings in America. According to White House officials, these panels will replay the costs of installation within 8 years and last Friday, President Obama announced measures designed to make solar panels affordable even for multi-family houses as well as new financing and training programmes for solar installers at community colleges.
One new project by electrical engineer Scott Brusaw could be a significant game-changer in the fight to reduce fossil fuel consumption by using photovoltaic panels to cover all the road and parking lots in the US and harvest the power of the sun on a massive scale.
These roadways are made of interlocking hexagonal panels made out of tempered glass. Tempered glass is a type of glass which has been toughened, processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength and embedded in these panels are photovoltaic panels to harvest the power of the sun.
Using the numbers provided by Solar Roadways, the 31,250 miles² of roads, pavements and car parks in the lower 48 states of the USA could provide, at least, a massive 13,385 billion kWh (based on an experimental road constructed in Northern Idaho and tested in January/February to provide lowest energy production values) of electricity per year. This is more than 3 times the entire USA electrical consumption in 2009 of 3,741 billion kWh and is enough energy to power the entire world.
The theoretical introduction of this solar roadway to the USA could lead to the closing of every single power station in the USA, coal, oil, natural gas or nuclear and, as they suggest on their website, by integrating the solar roadway with an inductive charge system, electric cars can be powered as they drive, removing the need for heavy, expensive batteries in the vehicles, reducing energy consumption still further. With this amount of energy potentially available to be harvested, it is difficult to even consider this microgeneration, as it could supplant all other initiatives.
Until the roadways become common, smaller scale microgeneration is an excellent solution which gives the homeowner the immediate advantage of dramatically reduced electricity bills. However this is often at the cost of the appearance of the roof as old-style solar panels are large, unwieldy and are attached over the top of existing tiles in a slightly clumsy manner. A neater and more attractive solution can be seen in some of the Solar PV tiles which integrate seamlessly with many of the standard clay tile designs like Grovebury, Double Roman and Mini Stonewold and with roof slates as well. These tiles reduce the difficulty in ensuring a weatherproof roof while fitting the solar panels as they are specially made to fit perfectly with your existing tiles.
Microgeneration is a very interesting idea in the field of energy conservation and household solar panelling which, along with measures to prevent heat loss, such as roof insulation and double glazed windows with appropriate U Values, could lead to a dramatic decrease in the need for energy from fossil sources.
The power companies might not like it but it could theoretically replace the power grid entirely.
