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Global Challenges

Global Usage of Solar Power Grows

Aired July 22, 2006 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

STAN GRANT, "GLOBAL CHALLENGES" HOST (voice-over): On this GLOBAL CHALLENGES, simmering sun.
HUANG MING, HIMIN SOLAR ENERGY GROUP: To change the life from cold water to hot water.

GRANT: Residents of China plunge into solar energy, lighting up.

DAVE IRVINE-HALLIDAY, LIGHT UP THE WORLD: It's almost indescribable.

GRANT: A Canadian professor focuses his energies on giving the gift of light. And winging it.

UNKNOWN: You can find new solutions for the future.

GRANT: A Swiss aviator looks to the sun to power his flying dream machine.

(on-camera): Hello. Welcome to GLOBAL CHALLENGES. I'm Stan Grant, coming to you from Dezhou, China. As you can see, a hazy day, high levels of pollution. Just the sort of place to focus on alternative energy. That's what we're doing this half- hour.

Continued instability in world oil prices and growing concern over global warming has people, businesses and governments looking for alternative sources of clean energy. In fact, you could say alternative energy has gone mainstream. Whether it be driving a car or flying a plane, lighting or heating water and homes, the options are there and they're being put to use.

Case in point, China, where wind turbines are increasingly seen throughout the country and more and more people are looking to the sun to energize their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRANT: Welcome to the future, a future when China is run by the sun. Well, perhaps not quite all of it. But certainly here in the city of Dezhou, in China's Shandong Province. It is known as solar valley. Up to 60 percent of this city is powered by the sun, providing not just alternative energy, but alternative lifestyles.

MING: To change the life from cold water to hot water, from outhouse lifestyle to house lifestyle, especially for the peasants, the farmers. They never--maybe in their life they take bath for only three times. First, first [unintelligible] the marriage. Now they can take baths every day.

GRANT: Huang Ming used to work in the oil business. He saw that as a dead end. The world, he says, will run out of oil. His focus now is on renewable energy. He started his company, Himin Solar Energy Group, 10 years ago. Business is certainly booming.

State-run news service, "PeopleNet," says solar energy will grow at about 30 percent a year. By 2010, sales are expected to double. Huang Ming says his company is growing sales by an astonishing 100 percent a year.

This is the biggest solar water heater factor in the world. It supplies enough heaters for about 40 million families. Now, that's about 200 million people enjoying hot baths and also using warm water to wash dishes and clothes, often for the first time. It is changing lives and it's an industry that's expected to grow.

Gash Hushuang (ph) uses solar energy for washing and cooking. She likes it. "It is clean energy," she says, "and keeps the family clean in other important ways."

"Before, we bathed twice a month. Now, we can take a bath every day," she says, "In winter, we can shower twice a day."

And it keeps the country clean. Much of China is still powered by burning coal. It adds to choking skies. China has the worst air pollution in the world. The World Bank says China has 16 of the top 20 dirtiest cities in the world.

China's environment protection agency puts the city of Linfen in Shanxi Province at the top of its most polluted list. Local residents suffer in the shadow of towering smokestacks. "The smoke comes from the factory, very black smoke," this woman tells me. "The whole village is covered in smoke. The smell is very strong."

Solar energy is an obvious clean alternative, but it still has a long way to go. Solar energy is becoming more popular, yet still accounts for less than one percent of China's energy consumption.

"Coal is the main energy China is using, as far as I know. It is around 70 percent of China's energy use," this professor says. "Natural gas is not used much. In the long term, this is not enough. We don't have enough coal. And it also causes pollution."

China is investigating using clean energy, but this costs a lot of money. Won Guong Ming (ph) is banking his future on the power of the sun. He sells solar water heaters. Business is good. He says when people realize how much they can save, more will go solar.

"They have obvious economic benefits," he says. "In big cities like Beijing, coal boilers are not allowed to be used anymore. Only electricity or gas can be used. In three years time, the expenses for gas or electricity would pay for the investment in solar energy."

From the factory to the rooftop to the kitchen, more and more Chinese are tapping into the sun's energy. The sloping panels cost from $160 to $750 U.S. dollars each. Expensive for many Chinese, but becoming increasingly common.

Huang Ming is a man with a dream, a dream, he says, to power his country and clean up its skies.

My dream or my mission is to dominate, to invade the conventional energy. Maybe the path for this 10 years is to substitute 10 percent of conventional energy. Then maybe in 50 years, 90 percent.

GRANT: He's starting small, but dreaming big and already proving that dream can be a reality.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GRANT: Coming up, shining a light on the lives of some of the poorest residents of India.

HALLIDAY: I feel a great sense of relief and a sense of expectation. I'm also--I feel what the villagers feel, that have gotten light, real light for the first time." It's almost indescribable.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GRANT: Welcome back. Cooking a meal in the dark has become a thing of the past for some residents of southern India. A visitor from Canada has shone a new light on their lives.

Satinder Bindra reports.

SATINDER BINDRA, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Life without lumination. As night falls, Rukman Rottor (ph) lives by the glow of this kerosene- fired wick lamp. Others manage with the light of their cooking fires.

Life's tough in this southern India village, but it's not the exception. There are thousands of communities like this in India with no access to electricity.

Rottor (ph) and millions of other Indians are too poor to even consider, leave alone buy battery-operated lights. But their lifestyle can be changed without spending too much. New solid-state lighting that uses solar power and consumes only a fraction of the energy of a conventional light bulb is being used to light up thousands of lives.

Dr. Dave Irvine-Halliday, a Canadian professor at the University of Calgary, has focused his career on finding cheap and innovative lighting solutions for the poor.

HALLIDAY: This is made in the village.

BINDRA: Halliday is visiting south India because he wants to start replacing these smoke-emitting lamps with solid-state diodes.

HALLIDAY: It works with electrons falling from the higher energy to low energy and the difference is light. It's, in essence, a very simple device and it's capable of being theoretically a 100 percent efficient.

BINDRA: Working one home at a time, Dr. Halliday and his nonprofit organization, Light Up the World, have so far wired and lit 14,000 homes in 26 different countries. On a hot afternoon, he sets about his business with gusto, setting up solar panels on the tiled roofs of huts. These panels will charge batteries that will run his solid-state lights.

An entire village turns out to watch. For everyone, this is history in the making.

A few hours later, Dr. Halliday checks out the fruits of his labor. His experiment has worked, giving Peter Niak (ph) and his family what they have never had before -- bright light.

Niak (ph) and his family are stunned. For the first time, Niak (ph) can cook his dinner under lights and see what he's stirring.

Just a few houses away, Rukman Rottor (ph) is thrilled with the huge change in his life. He sits down with his family for a meal, savoring the moment. "The light is great," he says. "Our children can study at night and we can also do our housework at night. The old oil lamps are bad and are harmful for our health."

Other than preserving their health, Rottor (ph) and his family say they'll also save money, because they no longer need to buy kerosene for lamps.

As word spread about the new light in their lives, an eruption of joy. Village women break out in song and dance. The hero of the evening, Dr. Halliday.

HALLIDAY: I feel a great sense of relief and a sense of expectation. I'm also--I feel what the villagers feel, that they've got light, real light for the first time. It's almost indescribable.

BINDRA: Indescribable and almost an unreal experience for these villagers. Their farming methods are antiquated and most have very low expectations. That's because everyone here is a Dalit or untouchable. The status in the caste system, a centuries old Indian method of social hierarchy, is so low, many upper caste Indians won't even touch them.

DR. HALLIDAY: Nobody deserves to be treated like that and the thing that really hurts me is why so-called intelligent, educated people can actually look down on somebody.

BINDRA: Dr. Halliday believes helping the Dalits will give them hope and set an example for other poor Indians. Dr. Halliday is establishing partnerships to manufacture and assemble the solid-state lights and accompanying batteries and solar panels. He's hoping that will lower costs and put these lights in reach of an estimated 1.6 billion people in the world who still spend their nights in comparative darkness.

For this Canadian professor, light is a right and because of his efforts, these villagers not only have light in their homes, but in their hearts and lives.

Satinder Bindra, CNN's [unintelligible] south India.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GRANT: China, of course, is a land of bicycles. But when we come back, you're going to meet a person who is shooting for the sky with his first-of-a-kind project.

BERTRAND PICCARD: The goal of the solar airplane is not to be financially profitable. The goal is to show that with very high tech, you can find new solutions for the future.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GRANT: Welcome back. A desire to raise awareness about alternative energy has one Swiss adventurer acting on impulse, quite literally.

Juliet Linley reports.

JULIET LINLEY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: This is a man who feels at home with his head in the clouds. After all, Bertrand Piccard made history in 1999 by circumnavigating the globe nonstop for the first time in a balloon.

Today, the Swiss adventurer has another dream.

PICCARD: I would really like to use adventure and exploration to raise enthusiasm of the public in favor of renewable energies and sustainable development.

LINLEY: To do that, Piccard and fellow team member, flying enthusiast, Andre Borschberg, will attempt to fly around the world in a solar-powered plane, each flying solo, but taking on different legs of the journey.

PICCARD: The goal is to show that with very high tech, with lots of innovation and scientific research, you can find new solutions for the future and this is really important, because then it can be implemented for the car industry, for the heating industry, for the transport industry, for everything.

LINLEY: This is a nerve center for his dreams, the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Swizterland, the equivalent of MIT. Piccard and his team have been working on this project since 2003. They call their flyer "Solar Impulse" and it's gaining momentum.

They say construction of a prototype will begin next year. Many of the details of its design are being kept under wraps, but these are the things we do know. The wingspan is expected to be as long as 80 meters, to offer maximum surface for the solar panels and minimum drag.

Lightweight batteries will ensure enough energy for night flights. The "Solar Impulse" prototype is scheduled to take flight in 2009. Knowledge gained from the test flights will aid in the construction of the final plane.

The flight around the world is now expected to take place in 2011, a far-off deadline because the technology doesn't exist yet. But researchers are working hard on getting Piccard's plane off the ground. The secret, engineers say, is in the material.

UNKNOWN MALE: You can see it's like a honeycomb structure in which the material is in between the two composite layers.

LINLEY: They plan to use a composite similar to the one they developed for Alinghi, the yacht that landed Switzerland its first victory in the America's Cup in 2003.

UNKNOWN MALE: So here you can see this type of composite material that is used for both structures like the Alinghi, but also in airplane structures.

LINLEY: It feels quite light.

UNKNOWN MALE: It's very light. But you think this is light, if you look now to the material that has to be used in the "Solar Impulse," we are down to maybe 20, 15 percent of the weight of the structure.

LINLEY: Researchers say one of the biggest challenges will be to build a plane that is stable and solid, yet light enough to fly above the clouds where the sun shines.

UNKNOWN MALE: Well, it still works, but I don't think it's the type of equipment we'll have for the "Solar Impulse."

LINLEY: Another challenge for scientists, making sure the two pilots, who will each be alone in the cockpit for days on end, will not fall asleep.

For that, researchers hope to adapt the technology used by these flying robots, weighing less than sugar cube, which are able to make decisions based on movement they detect.

UNKNOWN MALE: So we are going to design a new type of jacket that we will put the pilot and the airplane through a sort of symbiosis. The idea is that this jacket will record a lot of data continuously from the body of the pilot and will try to tell the pilot whether he needs sleep or that he needs to wake up and whether he's cognitively fit, so he's able to take decisions to drive this machine.

LINLEY: To keep the plane flying, the pilots will have to consume energy wisely. By making stopovers in every continent during the pioneering flight, the "Solar Impulse" team hopes to generate international debate on using the earth's resources wisely.

PICCARD: The pilot of the airplane needs to save his energy and needs very, very high technology to be able to fly through the night with the energy that was tall the day before in order to wait for the next rising sun and continue his flight.

And the citizen of the planet needs also to be really good in managing his energy and invent new technologies. Otherwise, he will never give the planet to the next generation before major disaster.

LINLEY: But making the plane fly will take more than just goodwill.

PICCARD: You can picture the cost of the project with about this kind of plane. So, basically, the developments and the missions will cost an average to a high level business class private jet. So, more or less, about $50 million.

LINLEY: So corporate sponsors, the European Space Agency, and donors of every kind are being mobilized.

Clearing the skies completely of regular aircraft isn't the realistic goal of "Solar Impulse" nor does the adventure end once the solar around-the-globe flight takes place.

Piccard says as soon as he lands, he wants to get his team immediately working on creating a two-seater jet, like this one, hoping to find politicians brave enough to go up in the sky to see how serious he is about clean energy powering the planet.

Juliet Linley, for CNN, Lausanne, Switzerland.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GRANT: And that's this edition of GLOBAL CHALLENGES. On terra firma, I'm Stan Grant, in Dezhou, China. Please join us again next time.

END

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