Tall Tales

Renewable energy can easily run your calculator or charge your cellphone.

They are even making cars that can run on solar energy and zero pollution carbon neutral cities.

But no way can you fly an airplane or sail a massive container ship without burning off obscene amounts of fossil fuel, right?

Wrong.

Alternative energy sources are not always for the cars and consumer electronics. As these  examples show renewable energy can do some serious, heavylifting . Like

1. Flying a supersonic fighter

Okay, I will wait until you are done laughing at the joke about making a football field sized solar panel and charging the batteries for 27 years just to power a plane off the runway.

Are you done yet? Great then. So, here’s introducing the,drumroll,Green Hornet

In case you are confused I am not talking of the suited crime fighting vigilante whose movie is coming out in 2011. I am talking of an US Navy F/A -18 Super Hornet fighter using a 50-50 blend of regular jet fuel and bio-fuel based on camelina.

Go camelina,go

This test flight satisfied all pre-set parameters and flew for nearly 45 minutes from speeds ranging from subsonic to supersonic. 8 months of testing and the Navy figures bio-fuels will be good to go for mass usage in the service.

And they didn’t even have to make that big ass solar panel.

2.Powering a spacecraft

Flying a supersonic fighter might still sound doable, but how does using solar wind to navigate a spaceship sound?

Lifted right out of Arthur C Clarke’s  “The Sunjammer”,maybe.

Yet science fiction, on May 10,  is going to turn into reality when the solar powered Japanese spacecraft named Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft accelerated by the radiation of the sun) blasts off from Tanegashima Space Center.

Ikaros comes with a flexible thinner-than-hair (0.0075 mm) polyimide membrane that will unfurl in space.This sail,made of thin film solar cells will generate electricity and also propel the spacecraft when the full blast of solar wind hits it.

This kite is shaped like a square and is 20m long, diagonally.Here is how the folks at JAXA (the launching agency) think it will look like in space

Solar power sail out in space

So what exactly is so rad in Ikaros?

Well, spacecrafts have been using solar cells for a very long time for generating electricity for internal use.However, for navigational and steering purposes small booster motors driven by chemical fuel needed to be used.End of fuel,bye-bye spaceship.

In case of Ikaros the steering devices present on the sail will continue to theoretically steer it till the range of solar wind, and with some modifications, for a very long time.For now, the May 10 prototype will aim to reach Venus, while a sister craft launched later this year will be launched at Jupiter.

UPDATE: Ikaros was successfully launched on 21 May after delays due to bad weather at the launching site. As of writing the rocket carrying Ikaros is on its way to Venus.

3. Sailing a cargo ship

Huge transoceanic cargo ships need power. Lots and lots of power.

And since civilian ships can’t use nuclear reactors(not that nuclear is Mr. Clean) they rely on oil to move billions of tons of stuff civilization needs across the oceans. Inevitably,they release obscene amounts of GHGs and particulate matter.

In fact,emissions wise,if you take global shipping as a nation,it would be the sixth biggest emitter of GHGs after China,US,Russia,India and Japan.Another crazy statistic-the 16 biggest ships out there emit as much SOx as the global auto fleet.

Infographic courtesy Carbon War Room

If you have seen my last post,GHGs like SO2 in the troposphere are some of the worst offenders in the gallery of global warming villains.

So cleaning up the emissions from shipping is going to considerably ease the pressure on the earth’s atmosphere.

To draw on a Star Wars analogy,making shipping  green is like shooting down the Death Star.That act is going to end the battle much more swiftly than zapping individual Tie fighters out of the sky.

Among the many ideas floating around for eco friendly shipping, one particular idea related to wind power has been demonstrated on commercial 10,000 tonnes cargo ships.It is called Skysail and is basically a really huge kite that pulls the ship along. Throw in bells and whistles like computer controlled sensors and high strength polymers and you got yourself a contraption that can reduce fuel consumption by as much as 20%.

Source: gCaptain

Implement this solution on all big ships and you can probably take India’s auto emissions off the balance sheet.

This solution also reminds me of the thing they say about the wheel turning full circle. You know,the whole cycle from wind to coal to oil and now back to wind in terms of sources of propulsive power

Planes, ships and spacecrafts,they are all unlikely suspects powered by renewable energy. These real life cases are yet another example that if technology can cook our collective goose, technology can also save us from mass extinction.