Potholes and Solar Turbos14.03.2008

Tags: Australia       Comments: 1

Solar Taxi is taking a break. On a ship from Perth to Singapore, Louis Palmer and his crew rest after travelling more than 21,000 kilometres around the planet. Time to look back at the first half of the journey.

The first half of our trip is over. After driving 21,359 kilometres, we push the Solar Taxi into a container in Fremantle and start a two-week break. We've been on the road for eight months and still have at least 25,000 kilometres across the Far East, North America and Western Europe and 20 countries ahead of us.

SOLAR TAXI: GOODBYE AUSTRALIA
Perth is our last stop, but we're not just sitting around. We have ten appointments and seven video presentations within 60 hours, a new record! We've been invited to talk at a joint meeting of the Royal Australian Automobile Club and renewable energy society.
Once it would have been unthinkable for two such different organisations to hold a breakfast talk together. How times change! Oil can now cost 109 US dollars a barrel. How will the world look in a few years with an oil price ruled by shrinking reserves and increasing demand, a price that simply follows market logic and rises and rises?

A journey full of surprises
Right now I'd rather look back. Our trip has been eventful and hardly anything went as expected. A place where nobody even looked at the Solar Taxi? Impossible! But there is one - Lebanon! The country with the biggest acceptance of small electric cars is European? No, it's India, also the country with the most traffic jams, the greatest poverty and the most traffic deaths - 100,000 a year.
The country with the most speeding checks was also the one where people were only interested in my top speed - Australia. The most cooperative government, which gave us a 24-hour police escort and 24-hour hotline to the Minister, was in otherwise formidable Syria.

Wire cutters and spouting oil wells
Only two countries, New Zealand and Australia, put their entire bureaucracy to work on a permit for the Solar Taxi to drive on their very quiet roads. And where were the Solar Taxi's wires cut by night? Not in an oil-producing nation, but in the peaceful Kingdom of Jordan.
Potholes made the driving an ordeal not only in India, but also in the EU, Hungary and Bulgaria. The most enthusiastic press reports about the Solar Taxi appeared of all places in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
The country with the highest solar energy use? Turkey, where almost every roof harvests the sun to heat warm water. Where is solar energy least widespread? In the sunny countries of Saudi Arabia and Australia. The Solar Taxi was often stopped by curious police in Turkey but in Australia the police were reluctant to let us drive at all, even though everything was legal.
Everyone, everywhere is now aware of the issues. Only here in Perth did I meet someone who claimed that there was no such thing as global warming. That people are even talking about global warming here is an achievement though. But where are the concrete measures?
A global rethink seemed impossible until recently. But even if all of humanity now knows the climate is changing, one thing is still missing. Where are the concrete steps for reducing greenhouse gases? Whenever I ask politicians, leaders and scientists this question their answers are full of words like "we should... we must... we could... we know". That worries and alarms me.
The Solar Taxi project is also plotting a course for the future. Sustainable, pioneering projects developed with the people we've met on our journey are in the pipeline.
But for now the Solar Taxi is on the high seas again and the team is enjoying a rest. We'll be reporting on our further adventures from Singapore at the end of the month.

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