Jenny Cottle
Solar energy is working, and most of it is coming from rooftops.
In the first two weeks of June, Germany broke records by generating over half of its energy from solar panels. On the morning of June 9, generation peaked at 23.1 gigawatts per hour – one megawatt is enough to fulfil the needs of 2,000 households.
In Germany, the focus has been on rooftop solar collectors on top of homes, businesses and buildings of any other kind. Currently, over 90 percent of mounted solar panels in the country are on rooftops. The popularity of solar panels on rooftops has been bolstered by generous solar subsidies from the government along with a successful ad campaign.
At the same time, the UK nearly doubled its peak 2013 solar power output. France, Italy, Denmark and other countries are also believed to have generated record amounts of solar energy in June.
This has been helped by community power projects that have sprung up across Europe.
In the UK, Balcombe, a village that became famous for its fight against fracking is now leading the drive towards community-owned, clean energy systems, launching a project aimed at building enough solar power to match the electricity needs of every home in the village.
In Australia, solar power is also growing. In February 2014, Australia had over 3.2 gigawatts of installed solar power. There was a 10 fold increase of solar panels between 2009 and 2011 – largely driven by mandatory renewable energy targets. However, to quote the Australian Renewable Energy Agency’s website, “Deployment of megawatt-scale solar electricity generation systems is still at an early stage of development in Australia.
The increased deployment of solar energy generation depends critically on the commercialisation of large-scale solar energy technologies.” … Or perhaps we need innovative community projects?
There have been some examples of large scale embracing of solar, most recently IKEA Australia announced it would roll out a solar panel energy system across its east coast stores, resulting in the largest commercial installation in Australia. Collectively, the installation, across seven IKEA buildings, will include more than 16,000 panels, with an annual output of 5495 gigawatts of electricity.
In a related aside, the World Bank has announced that actively fighting climate change would actually “grow the world economy” – which is contrary to claims by the Australian Government that fighting climate change would “clobber” the economy. Perhaps they just need to look past the short term short sightedness of coal?
Sunrise ©Jenny Cottle
Solar power is reducing in cost and government investment in it is growing economies and fighting climate change.
An in future, perhaps solar energy can be used to power our transport as well as our homes.
In an exciting development, European scientists have made ‘solar’ jet fuel (kerosene) from practically nothing but water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide (CO2). The new process can also potentially be used to produce a number of other types of fuel — including diesel, gasoline, and/or pure hydrogen.
“With this first-ever proof-of-concept for ‘solar’ kerosene, the SOLAR-JET project has made a major step towards truly sustainable fuels with virtually unlimited feed stocks in the future,” stated Dr Andreas Sizmann, the project coordinator at Bauhaus Luftfahrt.
The sun is shining, and more and more of us are using it as a guiding light for our future – just makes you want to sing!
Bob Marley – Sun Is Shining https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBDVarvFqYI&feature=kp
Get Social