Philippine Solar Car Team Ready for Australian Race

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This coming October, the Philippine Solar Car Team will be racing in high spirit in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge.

The race will be held on a cross-continent trip from Darwin to Adelaide from October 16 to 23 —a journey of almost 3,000km! They’ve trained doubly hard for the challenges of the Australian Outback. For another, they’re making the trip down under earlier, so that all preparations and tests can be worked out just in case problem arises the dry, Australian climate.

“I am mostly preparing for being inside a car for four to eight hours in the hot sun," said Danver Panganiban, one of the four drivers for Sikat II, this year’s Philippine entry in the race. Panganiban was also one of the drivers for the Philippine team in the 2007 race and now he’s all revved up to be back in his old hot seat.

Improved specs this time around due to the lightness of materials use for the car frame (50% less weight than 2009 Sikat), the design is more aerodynamic and will consume less energy due to the usage of Panasonic lithium ion phosphate batteries.

Overall, Sikat II has a top speed of 110kph with its two-kilowatt motor, ostensibly clocking in faster than its predecessors at the test run held at NLEX earlier this year. Running on its solar array, the car has a top speed of 85kph and can travel for more than 800kms.

Still, the team will need all the help they can get to gain an edge against Japan’s Tokai University Team (which won in the 2009 race) and the Dutch Team (which won four times before Tokai took away their crown), who are at the head of the pack. In 2007, the Philippine solar car entry dubbed Sinag finished 12th among 40 participating nations.

For a country who entered the race for the first time, that isn’t a bad spot to be in, but the current team is of the opinion that they can do so much better this year.

Running the race is of course a means to promote the feasibility of sun energy in the country. The whole idea behind the technology of a solar car is to hasten the development of alternatively-fuelled real world applications, eventually lessening dependency on fossil fuels.

“We have a lot of the solar resource here," said Ramon Agustines, President of the Philippine Solar Car Challenge Society, the pioneering organization responsible for putting the country on the solar race map. “It’s most viable in areas that can’t be reached by the grid, a very good way to light the outskirts. We hope people in charge will be looking at this more closely for uses in the local sector like agriculture and even in urban areas for lightening the load of commercial buildings."

“This is the future," agreed Jong Jimenez, a representative of Sun Power Philippines. “With the help of the solar car race, I am very optimistic about the future of solar energy in the Philippines."