Reduction of World's Fossil Fuel Consumption through Cargo Containers Superficial Photovoltaic Solar Energy Harvesting

Fossil fuel consumption rate is unsustainable for the planet not only because of global warming, but because in approximately 41 years current consumption trend will surpass production rate. The objective of this paper was to analyze technical feasibility of exploiting world's multimodal cargo container fleet top surface via photovoltaic (PV) solar energy harvesting along the entire transportation supply chain, whenever meteorological and logistics conditions permit. Cargo transportation power consumption will allow little or no need for energy storage and its global dynamic could enable constant PV renovation for efficiency re-enhancing. World's PV's production was exponentially and logistically forecasted, and the results show that unless growth rate ceases to increase by 2012, PV's production will allow harvesting more than 65% of world's cargo container fleet by 2030 to provide with an only 15% solar cell efficiency, more than 1.78 TW of power per year, supplying 7.58% of world's energy consumption ?mainly from the most pollutant transportation fuels such as fuel-oil or diesel? and curbing over 3 billion tons CO2 emissions per year.

Keywords: Solar energy, sustainable transportation, fossil fuel consumption, renewable energy.