World Solar Challenge

Cells made from GaAs are more costly than silicon cells, because the production process is not as well developed, and gallium and arsenic are not abundant materials. GaAs cells have been used when very high efficiency is needed regardless of cost such as required in space applications. They were also used in the Sunraycer, a photovoltaic-powered electric car, which won the Pentax World Solar Challenge race for solar-powered vehicles in 1987. It ran the 3000-km from Darwin to Adelaide, Australia at an average day time speed of 66-km per hour. The 1990 race was won by a... 

GaAs cells have often been used when very high efficiency is needed regardless of cost as required in space applications. This was also the case with the Sunraycer, a photovoltaic-powered electric car, which in 1987 won the Pentax World Solar Challenge race for solar-powered vehicles. It... 

In 1987, the first World Solar Challenge , a solar-powered car race through Australia, inspired General Motors, which at the time had just acquired Hughes Aircraft, to jointly develop a competition entry with the technology company AeroVironment [1], The Sunraycer (see Figure 8.3(a)) won the race with an average speed of about 67 km/h. 

The World Solar Challenge is a biannual solar-powered car race of 1,877 miles across central Australia. When the race was founded in 1987, the winner s speed averaged 42 miles per hour, but in 2007, the winner s speed had increased to 56 miles per hour. 

Arvizu, D.E., Meeting the renewable energy challenge What will it take to reach solar PV s ultimate potential, Presented at the 2006 IEEE 4th World Conf. on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, Waikoloa, Hawaii, NREL/PR-100-40011. 

The economic challenge is the cost of the hydrogen production. The world economy today is based on free energy naturally stored over millions of years. The price we are used to paying for fossil fuels is only the mining costs. In order to adapt the world to a synthetic fuel like hydrogen the world economy has to be convinced to pay also for the conversion of solar energy into a fuel. 

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