Spring 2022: NREL ETIPP Challenge
The aerospace industry continues to plague the world with carbon emissions. Our small business, Forever Flight Worldwide, was founded during covid in response to the global climate crises. Our small business’ main goal has been to assist the decarbonization of the aviation industry by supporting clean aviation infrastructure upgrades such as on-site renewable energy at airports. There are many benefits of an airport building on-site renewable energy such as increasing sources of revenue, improving bond rating, decreasing energy costs, and accelerating energy resiliency. Since airports are large consumers of energy, it is logical that all airports should berequired to be sourced from local renewable energy.
In the past, we have approached some small and mid-sized airports offering our skills to guide them towards net-zero as clean commercial aircraft begin to take off. Many airports ahead of their time have already developed large solar fields. Denver International Airport and Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport. After airports have their own solar or tidal/wave plants, they will be able to charge their electric and hydrogen planes.
Last month, we marketed our services to airports across the country targeting Indian communities. We targeted these communities because of a Department of Energy fund that was designated to Indian communities. This tribal fund was designated for various sustainability projects across the nation including solar pv. Our plan was to partner with any airport from within tribal territory as the funds could be used towards building solar pv eliminating costs upfront for the airport authority.
As a young company, our goal was to find one airport improvement project. That would allow our company to finally be self-sufficient, and would allow our team of recent college graduates to work on this full-time. The projects were generally proposed for 10 acres of solar pv as that would help the airport minimize its costs while increasing sources of revenue.
We designed a flier and a personalized Impact Plan that thoroughly outlined the multitude of benefits for any airport that decided to use the DOE Tribal Fund on solar pv at their airports. Our team would only like to share our flier as our Impact Plan holds much of our company’s intellectual property. We have attached our Business Plan Summary Flier which notes that aircraft are the most expensive aspect of the air transport system. This means that as clean commercial flight begins to take-off in 2023, most airports should begin to install solar pv on-site or nearby.
