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Charging around Australia Printed solar panels will be used to power a Tesla on a 15,000-km trip around Australia in September to make the public more aware of steps to effect climate change. The Charge Around Australia project is a partnership between British firm Charge Around Britain and the University of Newcastle in NSW. CAB director Stuart McBain, one of the people involved in the Australia project, undertook a trip around the UK coastline in an EV five years ago to prove that there were sufficient charging points for these vehicles. McBain also drove around the Iceland coastline in a Nissan Leaf to demonstrate that such a vehicle was up to the challenging trip. “More than a billion people around the world today have no reliable access to electricity,” said McBain. “This means that around one in seven people cannot refrigerate food or medicines. They are without a dependable source of electricity to power vital hospital equipment and lack clean, safe energy for cooking and lighting in their homes.” The portable printed solar cell panels will be used to charge the vehicle offgrid; the technology is known as organic photovoltaics. The solar cells have been developed by Professor Paul Dastoor and his team at the university. They are made from a lightweight, laminated PET [Polyethylene terephthalate] plastic that costs less than US$10 a square metre. The route to be followed by the Tesla in September circumnavigates the country. The project is a challenge to drive an electric vehicle, powered by solar energy, some 9,380 miles (15,097km) around the entire coastline of Australia. He will co-ordinate the research and manage the development and installation for the project. “We will be doing much more than just driving. Our project is also designed to educate and support people and organisations, including schools. We aim to shed light on the fact that the future of sustainable power generation for transport and our wider energy requirements is going to be with new technology. Our project will include challenges, experiments, interviews, research and a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) Roadshow. The STEM Roadshow will visit remote, rural and regional schools and communities across six Australian states and territories. Students will interact with research scientists who can inspire them by explaining the science behind solar technology and the Charge Around Australia project – and show them how to build their own plastic solar cells using non-toxic, risk-free materials.
AMT JUN 2022
In addition to the electric car that we drive around Australia on the journey, we will also use a support vehicle. The latter will double up as the team’s mobile home and act as a field station in which we can run experiments and gather data.” A statement from Charge Around Australia said the technology was in the beginning stages of development and printing processes could be improved. "Printed solar panels offer us possibilities that conventional solar panels do not. They are ultra-flexible, ultra-lightweight and ultrathin, so they can be used to cover expansive areas. In addition, because they are printed, they can be produced at extremely low cost," it said. "When efficiency levels are doubled to around 4%, it is possible that the technology will have the capability to generate the cheapest form of electricity on the planet. The potential of this technology is that every building and structure could have a coating on it that generates power." Others involved in the Australia drive are Aleksei Esguerra, support vehicle driver and health and safety officer; Dr Xiaojing Zhou, provider of key expertise in device design and development and performance analysis; Dr Ben Vaughan, provider of key expertise in supporting the fabrication and manufacture of the printed solar cell panels; and Dr Michael Dickinson, Provider of key expertise in the generation system design and development.
Past Projects Stuart McBain has been an electric car owner and enthusiast for many years. He is passionate about sustainability transformation, from using fossil fuels to power cars to using electricity. He has more than 40 years involved in sustainability and finding economically environmental solutions to business issues. He is an enthusiastic advocate of the theory of ‘environmentally sustainable, economically viable’ which helped inspire his previous ‘Charge Around’ adventures. Charging around Britain was McBain’s first Charge Around challenge. This was a 4,000-mile-long drive around the coast of Britain in his own Tesla Model S, starting and finishing in Liverpool. He took 23 days, visiting several sustainable businesses, including Whitelee Windfarm near Glasgow, run by Scottish Power Renewables and the Centre for Alternative Technology in Powys, Mid-Wales. Stuart covered 3,932.1 electric miles at a total fuel cost of just UKP7.50. Later that same year, Stuart McBain and his small team Charged Around Iceland. In a Kia Soul and a Nissan Leaf, he drove the 1332km ring road of Iceland with his 81-year old mother Anita in these sparsely populated routes which included areas where NASA astronauts went for off-planet landscape training. chargearoundaustralia.com
