Friday, August 10, 2012

Solar power

Solar panels at Luther College, Decorah, IA
In an article, The Secret to Solar Power, in the New York Times MagazineDanny Kennedy, with Sungevity, makes a strong argument for solar energy.  Mr. Kennedy observed...

Think about it this way. We’re killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200-million-year-old sunlight. Then we burn it . . . in order to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. We frack our own backyards and pollute our rivers, or we blow up our mountaintops just miles from our nation’s capital for an hour of electricity, when we could just take what’s falling free from the sky.

He further states... 

Humanity needs to be reminded that the sun’s putting out four hundred trillion trillion watts every second of every day, and we should tap that. Let’s wear it, be proud of it, push it. That’s the real motivation, I think. We’ve got to brand the sun.

Got sun, then why not tap into solar energy?  We had a solar company come out to see if it might make sense for us to install panels on our home.  Unfortunately we live by a hill and have too many large mature trees in our yard to make it worthwhile.  Long winter months when the sun is low on the horizon doesn't help much either...

3 comments:

  1. We really should be taking better advantage of the greatest source of energy and heat of all time, but the obstacle being man-made, currency, its a tad difficult when the world is spinning around the dollar bill instead of humanity and existence it self, for the greater good.

    -Sharone Tal
    Solar Installer Monmouth

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  2. Sadly, the environment isn't much of a factor when making financial decisions in this country. We tend to look for what is cheap, quick and easy for most of our solutions.

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  3. Energy Efficiencies are very hard to predict. As the economy changes so does the public's attitude about saving money on their bills. I would bet that if the economy came back strong and California was financially health, efficiencies would start to erode. That is a winning bet on my side as I have seen this in the past and present. It is part of my job at a large utility company to guess daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and even beyond energy demand for our customers.solar power in Nigeria.

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