coolbrisbane.org

Article by Jason Kimberley, Founder and CEO of Cool Australia

'I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.' - Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb (1847–1931)

What’s all this talk about the sun and its solar energy? Well, it’s rather important - it powers our oceans, drives the wind and warms our planet 24 hours a day. Pretty much everything depends on the sun for life - without it we would all be frozen out of existence.

The sun's energy is totally renewable – that is, it never runs out (well it will in around four billion years so we've got a bit of time to prepare). Enough sunlight falls on our earth every hour to power us for a year, but it’s the capture and storage of this energy that has been elusive. The capture and use of solar energy gives off almost no pollution. Although there is some in the manufacturing process, it is counterbalanced within the first two years of pollution-free energy production – from then on you have clean energy.

We are finally starting to get serious about using it. The international solar industry has grown 100 times in the last 10 years and is now turning over almost 100 billion dollars per year. This growth is great news for you and me because it means that costs are diving rapidly. In Australia solar costs have dropped by 50% in the last four years.

Solar energy (using photovoltaic panels or PV) has dropped to the same cost as buying energy from the grid for 70% of Australians. We are still not there in Tassie, Victoria and the ACT. We will have to wait until 2015. So apart from the upfront cost there is nothing to stop us from paying less for our power bills forever.

Last month I was chatting with a bloke about solar energy. He had just installed a solar unit on his roof and a new granite kitchen for his missus during some renovations. Both new additions cost around 10 grand each. He said everyone asked him, ‘when will the solar panels pay you back?’ His answer was, ‘every day’ and that the granite bench tops wouldn’t be worth a pinch of salt the minute they were installed. Solar panels reduce the cost of running your house.

The sun shines strongest when we need power most – on the stinking hot days when we hide inside and dive for the remote to crank up the air con. What could make more sense?

Strangely our Federal and State governments seem determined to wind back their support of solar because the schemes are just, ’too popular.’ Their support of the fossil fuel industry continues to run into the billions of dollars every year.

It’s time to get serious about solar! When you look at a solar map of the world (the best places are marked with red and the worst with blue) Australia stands out like a throbbing pimple – second only to the Sahara Desert. The opportunity for us to develop and export solar technology to the world is matched only by our inability to get our act together. There's nothing like the sun.

But the sun doesn’t shine all the time... what happens then? Well, there have been two major developments on this front. One is molten salts that store the solar energy as heat for use at night or on cloudy days, the other more widely spread storage is solar pumped hydro. During the day water is pumped half a kilometre up a hill by solar energy then at night time the water is released spinning a turbine to create energy. As all the water is pumped around in circles there is no need for a nearby water source.

I’ve just been watching a brilliant documentary series called ‘Wonders of the Universe’ presented by the physicist Brian Cox (as Molly Meldrum would say – “do yourself a favour, go and buy it”). It is one of those rare shows that left me in a perpetual state of awe. I find it simply impossible to get my little pea brain to grasp the enormity of the Universe that surrounds us.

There were a couple of Sun facts that I must share – the first one is a bit gory. If one were able to stand on its surface with out being incinerated all of our blood would be pulled down our body and out of our feet simply by its gravitational force. The second is that when the sun finally runs out of gas and goes out (in around 4 billion years) it will turn into a huge diamond the size of the earth. Wow!