I want a mission to find a way to live a more sustainable life and I've already
looked at the future of our fridge and the future of meat production but now I
want to see if there's a way we can generate enough energy to power our own
commutes after all predictions on fossil fuel reserves indicate that we've only
got 115 years left of coal production and only 50 years of oil and natural gas
remain so we've got to look for alternative options so how does this all
work then I'm revisiting the Center for alternative technology in Wales to find
out for myself
I've been trying to find ways in which I might be able to power my own commutes
in the future it's quite difficult for individuals to be totally
self-sufficient from an energy point of view you can put solar panels on your
own roof and contribute to your own electricity usage or you could buy your
own electric car but of an evening you would have to plug your electric car
into your house electricity system to recharge it so you need to be thinking
about where that eletricity is coming from at all times really to be truly
self-sufficient in the message personal investment as well it is it's it's
relatively expensive to put PV panels on your own roof and not everybody's house
is facing the right direction either can you explain how PV house solar panels
work okay cool so behind it you can see large solar
roof made up of lots of individual solar panels yeah when the Sun shines on them
they generate electricity at DC okay now we can then take that DC and we can turn
it into AC electricity which is what most people have Oh coming out of the
sockets in their house and we can either use it in our houses or we can export it
straight back to the grid okay and then so how do we and then we have to use
something to get it from DC to AC okay yeah there's a device called an inverter
which turns out DC power into AC power
I'm in Brighton home of the big lemon the UK's first fleet of school buses
these season in try the electric bass yes so notice little USB points yeah is
that solar as well yeah the whole the whole bus yeah
solar energy we have 128 solar panels on the roof of our bus depot
okay and that produces 21 kilowatts of power what about this bus and another
one very similar infant basically they run 52 service which the other bus is
doing at the moment you know these two buses of that route those solar panels
will give you another energy to be able to do that entirely without relying on
exactly this how do projects like this benefit the community Oh in a million
ways the bus service itself is very important to people on the outskirts of
town for a lot of people we are their lifeline into into town running on
electric means that they are zero emissions Brighton has a massive air
quality problem and has so many cities and towns in the country we're also
sharing as much of the data as we can so that other bus operators can also learn
from this file like and then hopefully it will accelerate the change to zero
emission buses across the country one of the disadvantages of something like this
it's a hugely expensive thing to set up yeah yeah I think the main it changes
the economics quite a lot in terms of much bigger investment to start with and
then the actual running costs are lot cheaper
let's talk stats yeah how long does the bus take to charge and how long will it
run for it goes from naught to about 99 mm-hmm that's percent not miles per hour
if only in six and a half hours okay and then that runs it for about 100 miles
mm-hmm and on the routes that we run in Brighton and Hove that lasts about 10
hours what are you saving what are the bear
that's massive so um if it's obviously with the renewable energy it saves 140
kilo grams of co2 every day every day at the moment you've got two buses in the
fleet are you hoping to expand that at all yeah well we actually got two
full-sized buses this size aggregate an electric minibus as well runs like
smaller shuffles and but in two weeks time we are getting four more buses of
the same size but they're brand new and fully purpose-built an electric and
we're we getting more solar panels to power them by mid March we'll be running
all our six bright and hopeful eats with electric buses powered by renewables and
we hope that in the future we can then expand that further afield and do that
in other towns as well welcome to Groningen in the north so we're here to
check out a solar Road this is a prototype bike path that uses energy
from the Sun and two feet of charging unit for all sorts of different gadgets
including electric bikes as you can see we've picked the perfect thing for it
the soda road outside how much electricity is it generating it is
generating approximately 3500 kilowatt hours per year what could that charge
one Dutch household which can be powered by 10 meters of road if we would cover
one-third of our road network with this type of technology with solar Road we
could power 8 million electric cars and that is equal to the total amount of
cars that we have today can you tell me a little bit about how it works it is a
solar panel integrated into a road and it catches the sunlight and converts it
to electricity and the difference with regular solar panels is that these are
very sturdy very strong yeah I felt that their guity their gritty that's
important because you have to have a safe road for the road users okay but
underneath there is well it's a different solar panel then what you put
on a rooftop typically it's more sturdy it's more more strong heavily designed
but actually it works like a regular solar panel that Gritti top layer it
provides grit but that doesn't make them any less efficient slightly I mean it is
of course a little bit of a compromise compromise that you have to make between
using it as a road and using it as a solar panel so they elect Rissa t from
the road is fed into a low battery that's next to the road and that is
connected to a charging station so what people do this is located next to a bike
road that is regularly used by a lot of people when they want to rest here and
then they can charge their their smartphone their and their tablet but
also their ebike if they have an e-bike but in other projects we connect it to
the grid for instance to to power the the lighting the public lighting that is
next to the road and then the balancing so when there is a surplus of energy
generated by the road it's going to the grid and when there is more electricity
needed then the road is providing we can get it from the grid so the grid works
as a kind of a balancing system and I guess in that type of situation actually
the generating the electricity ends up benefiting the whole community
absolutely if we were to create an entire bike path would you imagine every
inch of it would be solar panel or would it just be in chunks we estimate that
between and 30% of the total roads suitable for
application of this type of technology when you look ahead to the future of
this you're talking about changing the entire road network of a country how do
you feel being part of a project that has such long term goals it's a
frustrating sometimes of course well yeah that the steps that you're that you
want to take are not achievable at the moment but on the other hand if I mean
we have to think about long term here and and it fits actually quite well
because you see that roads have a very regular maintenance program when you tap
into these moments to make the decision either to go with this technology or not
and you program that actually then you can program your whole transition of
going from regular roads to solar roads in a very organized way to find out more
and how you can live sustainably watch the other videos in this series and
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