Kiwi-designed Solar Boat to Revolutionise Travel

A Kiwi-designed boat powered solely by the sun is set to become the first to circumnavigate the globe.

The Turanor Planetsolar has already made it from Monaco to Brisbane, arriving Down Under at a drifting pace yesterday.

"No sun, and the wind was against us, but we managed," said project founder Raphaël Domjan.

Its stop-over is a chance to re-charge following a period of overcast weather, which slowed the Catamaran approach to Australia to just 37 kilometres a day. But its crew said it could cover more than 200km per day without sails or a diesel engine, purely on the sun's energy alone.

The Turanor Planetsolar is powered by 540 square metres of solar panels.

The boat's crew are hoping to prove the reliability of renewable energy.

"It's a kind of promotion for renewable energies and for the use of renewable energies. The idea mainly is to show that it works," said sponsor Immo Stroher.

The boat is the brainchild of Swiss adventurer Domjan and solar technology companies sponsored its $17 million build.

The Kiwi company behind Pete Bethune's "Earthrace", LOMOcean, took on the challenge, with the Turanor being their first solar-powered design.

"Typically a 30 metre motor-yacht might be using 30 to 40 kilowatts just to air condition the boat - we've only got 20 kilowatts to drive the boat along," said Andre Moltschaniwskyj from LOMOcean.

To make most of that power, the team focused on super-slick hull design.

"And that sort of comes back to the New Zealand mentality of designing race yachts. You know a slippery hull is a fast hull, is a fuel efficient - or in this case energy efficient - hull," said Moltschaniwskyj.

"The capital costs might be higher, but then you don't have the high ongoing costs of providing diesel, and infrastructure to provide that diesel, and servicing of diesel engines."

The team are now in talks about using alternative energy for New Zealand ferries.

[It's] making us realise how carelessly, in some ways, we use power," says co-designer Andre Moltschaniwsky.

And we're very much used to how much energy there is - petrol, diesel and the fossil fuels we burn - and as a result we're probably quite wasteful of it."

Changes To PV Incentives In Australia Prompt "Solar's Last Chance" Rally

The global governmental trend of revisions to solar incentive programs continues, as Australia has become the latest country to roll back its financial support for solar energy. Earlier this month, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Greg Combet announced changes to the country's popular Solar Credits offering.

In the announcement, Combet attributed the revisions to "continued strong growth in the industry, the impact of this on electricity prices and the impact of the Solar Credits' support on demand for other clean energy technologies such as solar hot water heaters."

Australia's Solar Credits, which provide support under the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) by multiplying the number of certificates that these systems would generally be able to create under the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target scheme, will be reduced to a multiple of three (from four) on July 1. The new multiplier is expected to provide residential PV system owners with an up-front credit equal to approximately one-third of out-of-pocket costs, based on a standard 1.5 kW installation.

The multiplier will be further reduced over the next few years, declining to two in July 2012 and to one in July 2013.

According to the minister, these changes will "help reduce the oversupply of certificates, which is currently suppressing the certificate price in the SRES." A statutory review of the SRES is scheduled for mid-2012 and every two years thereafter.

The government has also announced plans to partner with state and territory governments to evaluate feed-in tariffs (FITs), which are still provided in addition to the Solar Credits mechanism.

The officials will verify that the existing FIT levels are consistent with certain previously agreed-upon principles and do not create an "unjustifiable burden on electricity consumers, either through cross-subsidy mechanisms or their impact on the SRES," the minister explained.

However, in New South Wales (NSW) - Australia's most populous state - FIT changes announced by Premier Barry O'Farrell have already led to backlash from the state's solar sector.

Last week, the NSW government closed its Solar Bonus Scheme and reduced FIT levels for existing participants from $0.60 AUD per kWh to $0.40 AUD per kWh. (The FIT for customers at the $0.20 AUD FIT tier remained unchanged.)

Government officials blamed the closure and changes on excessive taxpayer burden and program mismanagement; program costs are projected to reach up to $1.9 billion.

"We acknowledge customers who joined the original 60 cent Scheme had certain expectations of financial returns; however, the scheme was never intended to provide windfall profits to a few at the expense of many," NSW Minister for Resources and Energy Chris Hartcher stated in the announcement.

John Grimes, chief executive of the Australian Solar Energy Society (AuSES), criticized the decision, noting that the NSW government had promised it would not enact FIT cuts affecting residents who had already installed PV.

"Barry O'Farrell must keep his promise to the NSW electorate and immediately reverse his decision to retrospectively slash the solar feed-in tariff," Grimes wrote in AuSES' blog.

In response, AuSES and its supporters are holding a "Solar's Last Chance Rally" this week to call attention to the NSW's FIT freeze and payment reductions. According to AuSES, these actions could result in extensive job losses in the solar sector and monetary losses for residential PV system owners.