Photovoltaic

Tom is a solar photovoltaic panel installer.

“The costs of solar photovoltaic panels have plummeted by over 85 percent in under a decade, and by well over 99 percent since the first panels found their way onto people’s roofs in the early 1980s,” Wagner says.

Ghana has great plans for solar energy, but cloudy Rwanda has overtaken the West Africans by actually completing a large scale photovoltaic solar park.

The glittery blue wafer in Ed Witt's hand is no larger than a greeting card. But photovoltaic cells such as these are mighty, they can power everything from solar calculators to satellites. To demonstrate the latest technologies, Mr. Witt leads me to an outdoor testing site.

But the truly impressive part of this entry is the photovoltaic film that has been applied to the platform and entrance roofs (all 272 square metres of it). It is a UK first for the railway, and is expected to generate 36kW of electricity to meet the needs of the station itself and to feed the surplus back to the grid.