It's Easy Being Green

Engineers at Toyota are apparently working to build a completely solar powered car.  It will be a few years before the solar powered vehicle will be ready for sale but it’s a move the auto manufacturer hopes will help turn it’s business aound.  Toyota, just like most other auto manufacturers, have been hit hard by a slumping globabl economy and reduced demand for their products.

Sources say the car will be equipped with solar panels on the roof and will also be able to be recharged by conventional solar panels you might have on your house or business.  Toyota also hopes to eventually build and market a car that can be solely powered and recharged by it’s own installed solar panels.  The move has surprised many since Toyota is reporting its first sales loss in 70 years of business.  But the auto giant says it won’t halt it’s research in green technology despite the current bad business environment.

Toyota already has a history with solar power and other green technology.  The company’s plant in Tsutsumi has solar panels spread across it’s roof that would cover 60 tennis courts.  The panels produce enough electricity to supply 500 homes with power.  The company says the panels are reducing 740 tons a year of carbon emissions…the equivalent of 1,500 barrels of oil in reductions.

Toyota will also apparently get some help through one of it’s battery research partners, Panasonic.  Panasonic just recently took over Sanyo Electric Corp., a leader in solar energy.

I hope these researchers are able to get this done sooner rather than later and are able to make the technology affordable to the normal car buyer.  Can you imagine in sunny locales like Arizona and California, these cars would work like a dream…quietly whisking you from one errand to another powered by the cosmic giant above.

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The University of Arizona has unveiled their new, completely solar powered car for an upcoming competition.  Apparently it is completely street-legal.  Check out the link below:

UofA Solar Powered Car

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A team of scientists and researchers have developed a new way to harvest energy from the sun. According to an article on the Idaho National Laboratory’s website, the team developed “nanoantennas” that collect the suns rays on a tiny antennae about 1/25th the size of a human hair. The reports says the antennae could be stamped on just about any flexible material and essentially cost just a few cents per yard of material. To make the idea even better, the product can harvest energy long after sunset.

The team says their “nanoantennas” are more efficient at producing solar energy because they are also able to harvest infrared radiation, released from the earth long after the sun has set below the horizon. It’s also a spectrum that solar cells can’t currently turn into energy. They say while conventional solar cells can harvest about 20% of the sun’s rays, the new technology can harvest 80%.

Now the team will set forth on another challenge, figuring out how to take the harvested energy and turn it into something that’s usable. The frequency of the current generated switches back and forth about ten thousand billion times per second. Your common household appliance cycles power frequencies about 60 times per second. But the future is bright for this invention which could one day coat the roof of our home or be embedded in the clothes we wear.

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