South Africa Sees Its First Solar Car Race
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This is a guest post by Dave Harcourt of Pretoria, who is active in information transfer for agricultural processing in Africa, mainly via the DIGIVU Blog.
South Africa, recently dogged by electricity shortages at the state-run generator (Eskom), is innovating strongly in the energy sector. I will be discussing examples of this innovation in future posts, but now for the first of several reports on newsworthy energy related events in South Africa.
South African Solar Challenge 2008
South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) was one of the supporters of the South African Solar Challenge 2008 solar car race, which ended at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria this week. Solar car races are by no means new, but this is the first time one has been run in South Africa. The race, which was noted in a recent post on solar cars, was organized by the Advanced Energy Foundation.
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The 5 finishers of the 4,175 km trip from Johannesburg through Cape Town, the Garden Route, Durban, Van Reenen and Ermelo back to Pretoria represented a range of solutions from the aerodynamically beautiful Falcon, through the simple and tough Team Suna car to a hydrogen fuel cell powered scooter from Malaysia. The race was won by the Falcon from Tokai University in Japan.
No matter who won, the race succeeded in stimulating interest in solar technology and developing science skills. However, it was clearly only a small step forward. The final number of entrants was pared down from the planned 40 to only 6, of which 5 “finished” the race. The distance and climate extremes encountered by the teams posed significant tests for the cars. Furthermore, it does not immediately address the poor utilisation of solar energy in South Africa, noted in a previous post.
Sources: South African Solar Challenge, Engineering News, Pretoria News
Image Credit: D A Harcourt under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
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