During the World Future Energy Summit celebrated this year I was fortunate to attend Mr. Bertrand Piccard´s presentation on Solar Impulse. Mr. Piccard is known for being the first person who used a balloon to travel around the world non-stop. He founded Solar Impulse and, together with the engineer and fighter pilot André Borschberg, is responsible for the success of this project.
The Solar Impulse airplane does not use a single drop of fuel: it is powered strictly by solar energy. It has wingspan of an Airbus A340 jetliner, a length of 21.8 m and 1600 kg weight. This ultra-lightweight aircraft has 12000 solar cells allocated along the wings that capture the sun light during the day, charging the batteries that will provide the power to fly at night.
After 7 years of research and hard work, in the summer of 2010 the Solar Impulse airplane completed its first 24-hour flight. Tomorrow, May 24th, it will start a 48-hour flight of 2500 km from Switzerland to Morocco, with a technical stop in Madrid. It will depart from Payerne at 06:45 am (Spanish time), crossing France and the Pyrenees and landing in Madrid-Barajas airport at 02:00 am on Friday.
This will be the longest flight of the airplane so far, which is a preparation for the next challenge: a round the world flight in 2014.
If you want to be part of this journey, you can follow their first intercontinental flight tomorrow via live streaming from their website: http://solarimpulse.com/en/
The Solar Impulse team is not trying to make a revolution on the air transport, but on the mindset of the people and how they think of renewable energies.
In his speech Mr. Piccard said: "Our airplane is not designed to carry passengers, but to carry a message".
For me this project has demonstrated that clean energies can achieve things that might seem to be impossible a priori, so who knows if in a few years Solar Impulse will be delivering more than just a message?
