Environment
Arguably the most powerful force we have access to, is the sun. It’s been there for millions of years and will be there for many more millions of years.
Life as we know it would not exist without the sun. The greatest power in the universe and yet our lousy government can’t work out how to harness this awesome asset.
Along with most other policies, our government makes up its energy renewable programme as it goes along. There is not even short-term planning. Long-term planning for British politicians is the possible date of the next election.
Other countries are leaving us behind in the development of solar power. Take Germany for instance, in the early 1990s a German politician named Juergen Trinton, the then Environment Minister decided to embark on a solar power crusade. He was initially laughed at, however he persevered and his ideals have produced a massive industry, which is not only earning German masses of Euros from exports but is gradually converting German town after German town to solar power.
In 2000 the German government passed a law, which became known as the EEC law. It basically said that if you installed solar panels to your property then the German Electrical companies had to buy the excess electricity you produced at 49 cents per kilowatt hour. This was 4 times the commercial rate. This commitment was for 20 years. This brings the payback in financial terms to 10 years. This will reduce further as the technology improves. The real payback is, of course, for environment, because other than the carbon produced to make to solar panels the carbon emissions from the use of the solar panels is virtually nil.
Not surprisingly, with this type of incentive, the installation of solar panels has taken off. It was planned that by 2008 about 100,000 solar panel systems would be installed. The actual number of installations is now over 300,000.
The total power now being produced is 3000 megawatts of power. 1000 times more than 1990.
Sceptics at the time said that the solar panel industry would not produce employment. How wrong could they have been; there are now more 250,000 people in Germany working in the renewable energy industry. Of those 250,000, 90,000 are involved in solar power. This number is expected to be 200,000 by 2020.
Germany is on course to be providing 27% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and this figure will grow exponentially.
It is interesting to note that so far, Spain, Portugal, Greece, France and Italy have adopted or are in the process of adopting the same or similar scheme as the Germans.
Needless to say it is not the same here in the UK. The British Government has stated that they wish to have 20% of energy provided by renewable sources by 2018. However, as they have no joined-up policy on renewable energy, this is plainly pie in the sky and has no chance of being achieved.
As we have discussed elsewhere they are pinning much of their hopes on giant wind farms, which from the evidence available, appear to be only marginally beneficial and, of course, totally dependent on the wind blowing. It is possible that the only people who benefit from wind farms will be the companies that build and run them.
If the NDP was ever to reach power, a similar strategy to that adopted in German would be adopted here immediately. This would be backed up by further legislation ensuring that every new building built in the UK would have to have solar panels in place to provide the power the building required. Every government and council building would be given 10 years to change its power supplier from non-renewable resources to totally renewable resources.
That’s a start. We will go on from there.
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