Letters to the Editor
Saleem
Published Letters: 19 Editor's Choice: 4
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Entire states?
[Read the article: Ask Pablo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Gulliver quotes from the journal Science:
" 'The reason is simple. Solar energy is dilute. Once it’s collected the various applications become possible. But to collect it in the amounts required to make a real difference is a huge difficulty. There is no short cut, no technology can be invented to surmount it: massive areas of the earth’s surface must be devoted to it. Solar energy has been well understood for over a century; the amount of solar energy falling on the planet is known, fixed and unchanging. The areas required for collectors, if solar was to make a significant contribution on the scale of present energy needs, are, in turn, on the scale of entire states.' "
OK, maybe that last sentence applies if we were to obtain ALL our electric power from solar. But I don't think anyone is seriously advocating that. The question is whether vastly increased solar power generation, on both local panels-on-the-roof and larger thermal solar scales, is something that should be pursued, and pursued to the maximum extent possible. The answer to that is clearly yes.
To state that "to collect [solar energy] in the amounts required to make a real difference is a huge difficulty" is sheer nonsense. I know someone who installed solar panels on the roof of his new house, and his electric bill is close to $0. A comparable 3000 square foot house in Silicon Valley running the a/c as much as he does would incur electric bills of hundreds of dollars per month. Now, according to the Science writer's logic, if everyone in Silicon Valley had solar collectors on their roofs, this still wouldn't make a "real difference". As I said, that is utter nonsense.
All this talk about covering entire states with solar panels misses the point entirely. We can do a lot more to spread solar collectors so that they are nearly universal instead of nearly universally absent. And that WILL make a real difference.
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Yeah, nonsense
[Read the article: Ask Pablo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Gulliver writes:
"The only reason [solar panels are] as common as they are is because they're so heavily subsidized, which we can get away with as long as very few people buy them. Even at that they're expensive, but if they were unsubsidized you'd see a fraction of the panels that are out there today. So do we simply subsidize everyone's solar panels? Makes no sense, that would be no subsidy at all because we'd all have to pay higher taxes and electric bills to generate the subsidies, i.e. we'd be "subsidizing" ourselves."
Of course solar is expensive, and of course it would require a massive government undertaking to get more solar collectors on more roofs. Spending the money on solar DOES make sense, because of the urgency of the need to reduce carbon emissions. Solar isn't the only answer. But the environmental impact of putting solar panels on everyone's roofs is very minimal, and doing so would provide a substantial fraction of our energy needs. There are ways of doing this with minimal financial impact (see my post earlier about how the city of Berkeley, CA does it: they pay for your panels up front, then you pay them back over a set number of years with the savings from your electric bill).
As for nuclear: you know very well that nuclear energy is dangerous. I don't care how careful the industry is; any large scale complex technical endeavor will fail occasionally. That's why planes still crash once in a while, no matter how safe flying is relative to other forms of transportation. The difference is, releasing just a bit of radioactive waste into the environment can, depending on the specific isotopes released and other factors, kill or make ill a huge number of people. It's a risk that needs to be very seriously considered, and even if nuclear power is part of the answer to global warming, it is *nonsense* to simply dismiss solar as at least a partial alternative.