A piece in yesterday's NY Times Magazine...
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When we burn coal, gas or oil, we are simply harnessing an archived version of that same energy from the sun, stored in plant and animal life, compacted and preserved under the earth’s crust. As Kennedy puts it in his passionate but rational way: “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.”
That’s a hard argument to refute. Since the 1950s, solar cells based on Bell’s battery technology have powered craft as big as space stations, but they have yet to define our lives in the way that Bell Labs envisioned. Solar technology in particular has carried unfortunate political baggage for the last three decades. During the comparatively oil-rich 1980s, Ronald Reagan removed the solar water-heating system that Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House, a symbolic swipe at liberals. In 2011, Solyndra’s disastrous bankruptcy played right into the hands of politicians and pundits, who have gleefully pegged it to an anti-solar and anti-renewable narrative: solar isn’t reliable, we’re not good at it, the Chinese are better at it anyway, and so drilling and fracking are the pragmatic, job-creating ways forward.
The reason that the residential solar industry has begun to buck this general trend is because, instead of appealing to our heartstrings, it has begun to appeal to our checkbooks. The innovation that made this possible — selling solar services instead of solar panels — was pioneered in the commercial market by Jigar Shah. Though Shah was trained as a mechanical engineer, his most important bit of engineering was financial: in 2003, he started a company called SunEdison, which offered something called a solar-power purchase agreement (P.P.A.) to commercial customers.
Instead of having to pay all of the money for a solar installation up front and then having to carry that payment as a debt on their balance sheets, which no publicly traded company wants to do, companies like Whole Foods and Staples contracted with SunEdison to have solar panels put up at no initial cost. SunEdison then charged the companies for the amount of energy that the panels produced at a fixed rate for a period of 20 years — a rate that was less than what the companies were already paying the utilities, and that would ultimately save them even more money as energy prices inevitably rose over time. The bold stroke was that they were selling the power, not the hardware.
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If you want to take part in "solar power" movement then install solar and PV modules in your residential and commercial places. Reduce your dependency on bio-fuel with solar energy. Say no to coal, gas, diesel, petrol and other sources of energy. Contact a reputed solar panel manufacturer and installer and make your house enlightened.
Posted by: HK Chaudhary | August 16, 2012 at 07:32
Home solar power technologies can and will provide benefits to both the user and the environment. Residential solar power systems we can use which is better for the environment. By using the Sun, we will not be depleting resources of the earth. In addition to that, it is a clean energy source and does not pollute.
Posted by: Solar Panels | August 18, 2012 at 07:49