Trev - Another Aussie Electric Car

 

Meet Trev, the two-seater renewable energy vehicle; designed and built by staff and students at the University of South Australia.
 
Trev uses less than 1/5 of the energy required by a conventional car and can be recharged using clean electricity from renewable sources such as solar power.
 
Trev is a featherweight - weighing in at only 300 kilograms. The team who built the car feel "using a 2.5 tonne vehicle for commuting is ridiculous."
 
Unlike some of the other electric cars recently developed for commuting, the two-seater will achieve a top speed of 120 km/h; and has a stunning 150 km range under city conditions. It takes 3-4 hours to recharge Trev from a normal outlet and that can be reduced to just over an hour with a high-power outlet.
 
The rear wheel is driven by a 6000 rpm electric motor through a two-stage belt transmission. The electric motor provides 0–100 km/h acceleration in under 10 seconds and charge is stored in a 45 kg lithium ion polymer battery. The battery is expected to be good for 250,000 kilometres.
 
Trev's energy consumption during the Greenfleet Technology Class of the World Solar Challenge was a mere 6.2 kWh/100 km while averaging speeds of 80 - 90 km/h during the trip.
 
Team Trev will drive the car around the world in the 2010 Zero Race and hopefully we'll see direct descendants of Trev on Australia's roads soon. The prototype cost around $40,000 to build, very cheap by electric car prototype standards, with the battery comprising a quarter of that cost. Mass production of such a vehicle would see those costs plummet.
 

How Many Solar Panels To Power Australia?

 

Supporters of solar power often wonder how many solar panels it would take to power Australia and if grouped together, how much land would they occupy?
 
We can estimate the land coverage needed thanks to a project from the Land Generator Initiative.
 
In the accompanying image, the yellow box on the map of Australia shows the solar panel coverage required to provide all Australia's energy needs in 2030 - that's for everything - electricity, transport; replacing any other energy source traditionally used for the application in question.
 
The image is from a global map from the Land Generator Initiative whose calculations were based on the US Department of Energy's figures of projected world consumption of energy in all of its forms (including traditionally consumed from generation via fossil fuels such as oil and coal.) as projected in 2030 - a staggering 199,721 terawatt hours.
 
It's a big area; however LGI says we could reduce that amount by 5% – 25% by adding in other renewable energy sources such as wind power, wave energy and existing hydroelectric. New hydroelectric facilities are not considered as an option as their establishment wreaks havoc upon the environment by flooding valleys and altering river flows downstream. By using concentrating solar power technologies, the amount of land required would be far less again and existing rooftop space utilised for solar power generation would further greatly reduce the amount of land set aside for such an initiative.
 
LGI also points out that the overall area of the US interstate highway system, which was constructed in just 35 years, is 94,000 square kilometres, or 20% of the overall required solar panel coverage area for the world. Given the USA also consumes about 20% of the world’s energy, what it has in highway infrastructure already in terms of land area is enough to power the nation if an equivalent amount was used for solar panels.
 
Source: Land Generator Initiative
 

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