SolarWebsite.nl – information and news about renewable energy, electric cars and the World Solar Challenge

As regular visitors of this website will know I married my girlfriend on June 25th, 2010. During the preparations we were thinking about our transport needs from to the city hall, the party location and a few photo locations. Doing this by bicycle would have been the true sustainable choice but the distances involved and our clothing made this impractical. So, it would have to be a car. Because this was to be the day of our lives this could of course not be just any car.

After thinking about it for a while I set my sights on a Tesla Roadster, a electric high performance sports car. But how to get ones hands on one? I've made quite a few test drives in electric vehicles in recent times, and that allowed me to build a nice network. But even in this network I could not find a Roadster to hire for a day. Even the sustainable transport department at work couldn't get me a Roadster for a reasonable price.

The solution came, as happens often, by accident. A colleague at work e-mailed me a link to a movie () featuring the Roadster, and in that movie the company Remotion was named - which is now called The New Motion (). I gathered my courage and sent them an e-mail in which I told them who I was, what I did (a.o. this website), that I was getting married and that I was looking for a sustainable (or at least as sustainable as possible) wedding car. The e-mail I received back from Alef Arendsen (who can be seen in the movie) exceeded all my expectations. The company extended all cooperation and allowed me to use the Roadster at no cost (!) as our wedding car, and employees even delivered and retrieved the car. I couldn't believe my luck!

(more...)

My girlfriend Annelies and I are getting married on June, 25th, 2010. We've been together for more than ten years and we both thought that the time is right. It's all fine that I sit here behind my computer, writing about longterm stuff (Peak Oil, climate change, etc.) but every once in a while you have to do something long term yourself - and this is it.

We're working on the preparations (have been for a while now), nearly all the big things have been taken care of, but with things like these there are a million small things that need to be organised. We're on schedule, and it's great fun to work together on something this big and this important.

(more...)

Today the solar-powered electric airplane Solar Impulse () made its third test flight:

It's clear that this project depends heavily on good PR, these flight movies are works of art. If I'm not mistaken this was the first flight where the streamlined cockpit canopy was mounted, and this flight was used fly this airplane a bit more aggressive than before to further test its flight characteristics.

According to the commentary the team expects to be able to fly a complete day-night-day cycle (where the plane flies on solar energy during the daytime, simultaneously charging it batteries, and flying on its batteries by night) within one or two months.

TheTwike () (which I drove around for an afternoon () in 2007) is a fun and light three-wheeled electric vehicle but both its design and its technology are starting to show their age - although ever more powerful batteries became available, eventually pushing the range to over 200km.

TW4XP

A few people who are directly and indirectly involved with Twike are developing a successor, which currently listens to the rather unprosaic name "TW4XP" (). The name stands for  "ThreeWheeler 4 X Prize" and after some research it becomes clear what's behind both the car and its name.

The X Prize Foundation () was founded to finance large competitions to force breakthroughs in several high-tech areas. For example, the Foundation paid US$10 million to the winner of the 2004 Ansari X Prize (), the company Scaled Composites () which succesfully launched the first non-government-sponsored (albeit suborbital) spaceship.

The Foundation is currently running the Progressive Automotive X Prize () in which teams can compete with designs for ultra-efficient vehicles. The vehicles will be judged by efficiency, safety, handling qualities, usability and the ability to be mass-produced. The winning teams in the several classes will receive a certain sum of money to help them to start op mass-production.

The TW4XP (you can win $1000 () by coming up with an original name) is, just like the Twike, a three-wheeled electric vehicle with support from pedal power. I am not a big fan of the whole pedal power thing, I thought the Twike without pedals drove easier but according to Twike they sell about 90% pedal-versions so it must appeal to many people. The site is a bit light on the technical details of the vehicle, and it even seems that there is not physical protoype yet, only a few renderings. The specifications () state that the top speed will be above 80mph (= ± 130 km/h), which is substantially higher than the Twike current top speed of 55mph (= ± 85 km/h). The energy consumption seems to be considerably higher than that of the Twike: 16 kWh per 100 km vs. 5 kWh per 100 km, but I guess that's to be expected at higher speeds. I do hope that the designers will keep to the design philosophy of the Twike by keeping the vehicle very light. Light vehicles use less energy (both during construction and while being driven) and are also much safer for truly sustainable road users like pedestrians and cyclists.

I hope we will hear a lot more about this.