By Jason Paur

Solar Impulse, a prototype of an airplane designed to fly around the world using only solar power, made its first real flight today. As the sun shone down on the Swiss countryside an aircraft powered by 12,000 solar cells flew for 87 minutes to an altitude of nearly 4,000 feet.

Solar Impulse program founder Bertrand Piccard called the inaugural flight a crucial step toward fulfilling his goal of circumnavigating the globe in such an unusual aircraft. In a statement from the Solar Impulse team, Piccard said he was relieved to have the first flight completed after seven years of hard work.

“This first mission was the most risky phase of the entire project,” Piccard said.  “Eighty-seven minutes of intense emotion after seven years of research, testing and perseverance. Never has an airplane as large and light ever flown before!”

The aircraft, known by its identifier HB-SIA, has a wingspan of a jumbo jet yet weighs the same as an average sedan. It made a “flea hop,” as the team called it, back in December when it lifted about three feet off the runway and flew less than a quarter mile. Today’s flight demonstrates that the airplane can not only fly, it can do so for an extended period at altitudes high enough for basic flight testing.

”This first flight was for me a very intense moment,” test pilot Markus Scherdel said after emerging from the solar airplane’s podlike cockpit.

During the flight, HB-SIA lifted off at just under 30 mph and a relatively short takeoff run. The four 10-horsepower electric motors are expected to deliver enough power for a cruise speed of around 40 to 45 mph. No, Solar Impulse won’t set any speed records.

Scherdel said the first flight was a familiarization flight for he and the team.

“The execution of these various maneuvers (turns, simulating the approach phase) was designed to get a feel for the aircraft and verify it’s controllable,” Scherdel said. Despite the plane’s immense size and light weight, the team found the plane met their expectations.

The wingspan of HB-SIA is 208 feet, that’s about 10 feet more than Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. But the airplane only weighs 3,500 pounds loaded for flight, about 499,000 pounds less than the 787.

After more flight testing with the sun powering HB-SIA, the Solar Impulse team hopes to perform night testing later this year. During those flights, the team will examine the viability of the schedule they plan to use for the around-the-world flight. The plan is to climb to higher altitudes during the day, and trade that altitude for airspeed, supplemented with battery power, to continue flying during the night. They expect to fly 36-hour shifts.

Piccard says the many years of work paid off today, but the work is only beginning.

“We still have a long way to go until the night flights and an even longer way before flying round the world, but today, thanks to the extraordinary work of an entire team, an essential step towards achieving our vision has been taken,” Piccard said in the statement from the team.

The around-the-world flight is scheduled to take place in 2012 with an updated version of HB-SIA. The flight will take place in several stages with pilots alternating regularly and a team on the ground keeping a careful eye on weather for the delicate aircraft.

Photos: Solar Impulse

Solar panels are visible on top of HB-SIA’s 208-foot wing.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/04/solar-airplane-completes-maiden-voyage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

Mercedes-Benz is introducing a “research vehicle,” er, concept at the Geneva Motor Show next month that combines hydrogen fuel cells with plug-in hybrid.

That means the F800 Style can travel for 18 miles on electric power alone after being plugged in overnight — and when it runs out of juice it can cruise for another 375 miles on hydrogen. The result: no emissions.

Since it’s a concept and an automaker can can hog-wild — not that staid Mercedes would ever call it that — the F800 has cool sliding rear doors and a sparse interior.

“We are dedicated to reconciling our responsibility for the environment with practical customer utility in a fascinating automobile,” says Thomas Weber, the Daimler Board of Management member responsible for R&D.

The plug-in hybrid powerplant pairs big batteries with a V-6 engine capable of 300 horsepower, or 409 horsepower when the electric motors kick in.

For driving on fuel-cell power, Mercedes-Benz engineers somehow found a way to tuck that componant under the hood with an electric motor near the rear axle nd four hydrogen tanks, two of which are between the passengers.

by Alan Boyle

A Toyota Scion converted to all-electric power is plugged into California’s electrical
grid during a demonstration at the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Someday, someone will pay you to hook your car into the electrical grid. It’s one of those almost-a-sure-thing business opportunities enabled by the expected rise of plug-in vehicles. But will the payoff be worth the cost? That’s where the calculations get a little complicated.

Experts on the future of the electrical grid and plug-in electric cars came together this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to discuss their common interests.
The concept of moving power back and forth between a smarter grid and more capable electric cars, known as vehicle-to-grid or V2G, is a “perfect bridge technology” for two complementary energy frontiers, said Jasna Tomic, new-fuels project manager for Calstart, a nonprofit energy research center headquartered in California.

It’s a concept that utilities are willing to shell out money to support, said Ken Huber, senior technology and education principal at Pennsylvania-based PJM Interconnection.

PJM coordinates power transmission for a region that takes in all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia. One of the big challenges for companies like PJM is to keep the load on the regional grids as stable as possible. Too much of a load is bad, potentially leading to brownouts. Too little of a load can also be bad, especially as electric utilities move toward renewable sources such as wind and solar energy.

To keep its regional grid stable, PJM needs to have battery storage capability equal to 1 percent of its peak load. Since PJM’s peak is around 100,000 megawatts, “we have 1,000 megawatts moving up and down,” Huber explained.

So here’s where your future electric car enters the picture: PJM is currently paying battery providers somewhere around $25 to $35 per megawatt-hour to have that electrical storage available. If you have a plugged-in car just sitting idle, PJM would love to have a system that could take a little bit of the power out of your car battery during peak times, and send it back out to your battery during off-peak hours.

“It has a very, very high value to the grid,” Huber said.

How much is it worth?
Exactly how much value? That’s the point of a pilot project operated by a group called the MAGIC Consortium. The consortium started small, connecting just a few cars from the University of Delaware’s campus fleet. The cars were Toyota Scions that were converted into all-electric “eBoxes” using AC Propulsion’s kit.

The conversion also required the addition of a power control box that could transmit and receive data about the battery’s state as well as the electric company’s power requirements over a secure Internet connection. After all, the last thing you want is to have somebody hack into your car.

Three or four cars are hardly worth developing a system for, but for the University of Delaware test, the AES power company served as an aggregator for battery capacity. The payment to the customer – in this case, the University of Delaware – was based on how much capacity the cars’ batteries held (19 kilowatt-hours), and how long the car was plugged in (on average, 21.5 hours a day).

The payments typically amounted to $300 per month per car, said Willett Kempton, senior policy scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

Not ready for prime time
If you consider merely the $500 cost of adding the control box and software, that’s a good deal. But if you factor in the cost of converting the car into a plug-in vehicle – an expense that can range into tens of thousands of dollars – you definitely wouldn’t do it just for the power company’s payout.

“Right now, because batteries are expensive, the value is less than the cost,” Kempton acknowledged.

You’d have to consider other benefits – for example, the fact that you could charge up your eBox for a 150-mile trip for just a couple of dollars, which is less than the price for a gallon of gasoline.

AP file: The Chevy Volt goes on display at the Washington Auto Show.

Although converted plug-ins such as AC Propulsion’s eBox are available now, most people will probably wait to make their plug-in purchase until they get a look at mass-market vehicles such as the Chevy Volt (a gas-electric hybrid) and the Nissan Leaf (which is all-electric). Both those models should be available starting late this year.

It’s too early to judge just how much impact plug-in cars will have, particularly when it comes to vehicle-to-grid technology. But if a million electric vehicles hit the streets in the next five years, as President Barack Obama has suggested, something will have to be done to accommodate that extra load on the grid, Huber said. That could take the form of demand-sensitive pricing for electricity – which would make V2G more attractive.

“I don’t believe we’re going to be in the situation we’re in today for very much longer,” Huber said.

Boosting the batteries
Better battery packs will be key to the success of plug-in vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt. General Motors has developed a new breed of 16-kilowatt-hour batteries based on lithium-manganese chemistry – as well as a cooling and heating system to keep those batteries at a stable temperature.

“We call the battery the ‘fifth passenger’ sometimes, because we take such good care of it,” Posawatz told me.

As more plug-ins are sold, more and more batteries will be available to store and eventually use the energy that’s generated by solar and wind. “We’re going to make this asset available to plug in all the time to collect the energy created by this green technology,” Posawatz said.

GM is working on a number of initiatives for smart charging and automatic software upgrades, including technologies that take advantage of the automaker’s OnStar service. But it will be a while before vehicle-to-grid technology is built into the Volt, Posawatz said. “Two-way energy transfer is several years out,” he told me.

It’s more likely that car owners will use their own “smarts,” once cars like the Volt have been around for a while. Some might sign up for a V2G upgrade from the utility, like the system pioneered by the MAGIC Consortium. Others might install solar panels at home and use their plugged-in car as a storage device for home-brewed electricity.

In the long run, car owners might even save their old plug-in batteries to store more power at home. “We believe the battery will have a life outside the car,” Posawatz said.

But pretty much everyone agrees that the most important milestone on the road to plug-in paradise will be cheaper batteries. Right now, the batteries for plug-in cars cost $1,000 or more per kilowatt-hour – which makes the plug-ins much more expensive than their petroleum-fueled counterparts. The battery cost is so significant that the National Research Council concluded it would take decades for the benefits of plug-ins to outweigh the costs.

“That’s the biggest challenge,” Posawatz acknowledged. “How can we quickly move down the cost curve and get the technological advances going? Certainly the automotive industry does not move as quickly as the telecommunications industry. … Can we make that kind of progress on a shorter time scale?”

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/02/19/2206517.aspx

Norway opened on Tuesday the world’s first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.

State-owned utility Statkraft’s prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.

“While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an interesting part of the renewable energy mix of the future,” Statkraft Chief Executive Baard Mikkelsen told reporters.

Statkraft, Europe’s largest producer of renewable energy with experience in hydropower that provides nearly all of Norway’s electricity, aims to begin building commercial osmotic power plants by 2015.

Here is the company’s illustration of how the plant works.

(Credit: Statkraft)

The main issue is to improve the efficiency of the membrane from around 1 watt per square meter now to some 5 watts, which Statkraft says would make osmotic power costs comparable to those from other renewable sources.

The prototype, on the Oslo fjord and about 40 miles south of the Norwegian capital, has about 2,000 square meters of membrane.

Future full-scale plants producing 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide power for 30,000 European households, would be as large as a football stadium and require some 5 million square meters of membrane, Statkraft said.

Once new membrane “architecture” is solved, Statkraft believes the global production capacity for osmotic energy could amount to 1,600 to 1,700 terawatt hours annually, or about half of the European Union’s total electricity demand.

Europe’s osmotic power potential is seen at 180 terawatts, or about 5 percent of total consumption, which could help the bloc reach renewable energy goals set to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases and limit global warming.

Osmotic power, which can be located anywhere where clean fresh water runs into the sea, is seen as more reliable than more variable wind or solar energy.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10404158-54.html

Fifteen flower-shaped solar panels have been installed in an open space between a highway and a retail lot in Austin, Texas.

They not only provide a green source of energy, but also bring a fresh look to solar panel design.

Designed by Massachusetts art duo Harries/Heder, the SunFlowers are an art exhibit at heart, and stand over 30 feet tall.

They collect power from the sun by day, and use that energy to power their blue LEDs at night.

Up to 15 kilowatts of surplus power is sent back to the grid as payment for any maintenance fees the SunFlowers incur.