GEORGE, South Africa: At first look there’s not anything out of the ordinary about the regional airport in George, a metropolis of simply 150,000 citizens on South Africa’s south coast.
In reality even though, the small website is Africa’s first “inexperienced” airport to be powered with the aid of the sun.
The control tower, escalators, test-in desks, luggage carousels, eating places and ATMs—each service right here depends on a small sun electricity station, positioned a few hundred meters away in a subject of dandelions next to a runway.
Its 2,000 sun panels produce up to 750 kW each day, effortlessly surpassing the four hundred kW had to run the airport.
The excess is fed returned into the municipal electricity grid, and a laptop screen within the terminal informs passengers: “Within this month (September), 274 households were supplied through this machine with green strength.”