Flying without fossil fuel

This are the pictures of Solar Impulse 2 the plane that flies on solar power generated from the 17000 odd solar panels that are spread across its wings and body. The wingspan is 72 meters. The solar impulse 2 is set to circumnavigate the earth in  2015 .

       The earlier version Solar Impulse successfully flew across US east cost to west cost.  This would be a single seater plane. The beauty of this plane is it would not require any fossil fuel to fly all the energy will  be drawn from the sun and also a good part of the energy would be stored in the batteries to fly in the night .

          The entire plane is made from carbon fibre and it weighs around 2300 kgs which is equivalent to that of a family car.

Salora unmanned drone of Titan Aerospace

          Google recently acquired a company called Titan Aerospace that makes lightweight drones that are similar to this planes of course the drones are unmanned and this drones can be airborne for at least 5 years at a stretch thus acting as an atmospheric satellite. Google would use this drones in its ambitious loons project which aims to provide affordable Internet connectivity to places where people have no Internet access. 

        This drones and airplanes mark a new era of satellites and planes. Surely the solar drones can act as excellent low altitude surveillance , communication and mapping systems , they will be cheaper than space satellites.

        One can have thousands of this drones circling a particular area around the world to provide Internet access in those parts .

         An entire global communication network of this wireless drones can be made that would make Internet affordable and available across the globe to every person on earth.

           

    

SOLAR ENERGY

The greatest source of energy that powers the entire earth is the Sun itself. In fact life exists on earth because of the sun had there been no sun there would have been no plants at all whether microscopic or large ones. The plants have a chemical in them called chlorophyll and using this chlorophyll plus the nutrients and water absorbed by their roots from the earth and the sunlight falling on them plants create their own food through a photochemical process called photosynthesis .Now these plants are consumed by small and large animals and some of the smaller insects are consumed by larger creatures while there are some other living organisms that are carnivorous those who consume both meat and plants. We the humans are such carnivores at the top of this food chain.

Now the sustenance of life on earth totally depends not only on food but water is even more essential ,while the organisms living in sea has access to unlimited amount of water those living on land have a limited supply of water that's fit for their consumption. Clean water that can be consumed by land animals is supplied from rivers,lakes and ponds and water comes into them through rain ,now how these rain happen water on the surface of the sea evaporates these evaporated water accumulates at higher layers in the atmosphere the accumulated vapour form clouds and these clouds condense into rain droplets that fall back on the surface of the earth this water is fit for consumption by humans and other land animals. So its the the energy of sun that resulted in rain.

Again consider the energy we use to cook wood derived from trees or coal that is nothing but

the trees that once existed on the surface of the earth which were buried below the earth and became coal under high pressure over millions of years. Again butane gas that we used for cooking is derived from petroleum which are again marine organisms and plants that were buried below the surface of the earth and these plants and organisms also came into existence because of the energy received from the sun.

Again talking about wind energy the winds exist because the atmospheric pressure everywhere on earth is not uniform the difference in atmospheric pressure leads to air from high pressure areas move towards the low pressure areas and this causes winds. The non uniformity of atmospheric pressure is due to the sun that results in different temperature at difference places on earth.

Now the most renewable source of energy on earth is the sunlight itself the technology to convert solar energy directly into heat energy has been there for quite a few decades but was not commercially viable till now however in the last two years the cost of solar energy has come down drastically and now it is just a little bit more than grid electricity surely in the next two to four years the solar energy price would be at par with the price of grid electricity and this would lead to a complete new revolution ,today one thing we see is that all electronic consumer goods are becoming energy efficient the CRTs are replaced by LCD,LEDs. The bulbs are replaced by fluorescent lamps followed by LED lamps and when you combine this with affordable solar electricity that means one does not have to depend on grid electricity totally for their energy requirements so one can move to remote places where he can receive adequate amount of sunlight and live a normal life with adequate amount of solar electricity supply.

Again there are still millions of people in India who don't have access to electricity for them affordable solar electricity will be a boon that would revolutionize their lives. This would also save billions of dollars of imports of coal and oil since there would be cars that would run on solar electricity.

So you see the real source of energy is in front of us that can change the world in the next few years surely the developing world would be immensely benefited from solar energy also its a clean and green solution 0 CO2 emissions no trees have to be cut down no large scale displacement of people ho harmful gases. In fact there are places where solar are placed over canal so that the loss of water from canals due to evaporation is minimised , the large scale use of solar panels around the world will help the environment immensely and is absolutely vital for the sustenance of life on the surface of the Earth.