I came across a piece the other day in The Peninsula, Qatar’s leading English Daily, covering the harnessing of solar power. The article is on a French engineer, Olivier Boegner, whose passions are solar power and sailing. Now I had never considered solar power anything but a secondary standby power system. Here we have it as the prime one. With a little research I then came across the MW-Line company in Switzerland who have been making solar powered boats for several years - the one shown runs for less than 1Euro per day which is simply just quite staggering. I think that the downside will off course be speed when compared to traditional fossil fuelled engines. However, with engineers like Olivier pushing the boundaries (and attempting ventures like a planned British Channel crossings), this technology and application will continue to mature.

In terms of power protection I think that we will see a merging of battery and solar power technologies for buildings in the future to create a central storage of electrical energy. From this ‘local pool’ electrical devices will be able to draw their standby power. This has implications not just for Uninterruptibe Power Supplies but any back-up device. It will provide building engineers with a central maintenance point for standby power and provide a host of benefits - the only downside is that there is still no cheaper energy store than a battery, and especially the sealed lead acid maintenance-free type.