I'm looking to buy a house just now and since many older houses have direct electrical heating I am very interested in alternative energy, solar power being one of them.However, when you read the article in SvD today, you get the impression that solar power can solve the worlds energy problems and help replace all those nuclear reactor and coal plants. I'm just not convinced of this. Sure there is a collosal amount of solar energy waiting to be tapped into, but you have to collect it first. Solar cells are not that efficient, giving them quite a low power to weight ratio compared to nuclear and fossil fuels. This means you need a lot of surface area to collect useful amounts of energy. I haven't calculated how much you need to replace a nuclear reactor, but I bet its pretty huge.
It's the same thing with running cars with solar power, you have a limited space on the roof of the car (assuming you don't have a roofbox!) and that just can't generate enough power to run the engine, even in a hybrid. The best solar powered cars are totally engineered to to be as lightweight and efficient as possible, but none of them would make practical veichles. So you end up back to a combustion engine of some sort. Solar powered cars tend to get tested in places like Australia where you have lots of sun anyway. It's not exactly like that in Sweden is it?
Maybe if all the houses had solar cells then the collection area would mount up to someting big enough to close down some conventional reactors, but then you run into the other (rather obvious) problem of what to do at night. Nobody has found a way to store large amounts of electricity, so you will always need back up capacity at night.
This was a good article in that it will raise awareness and hopefully bring in investors, which will drive prices down and spark innovations, but like so many articles on alternative energy sourses it is high on possibilities but low on practicalities. If solar power is going to make a big impact though the efficiency of the cells will need to be increased, whilst the manufacturing costs will need to come down.
I'd love to see more solar power (or indeed any alternative power sourse) and I am quite concerned that we might be being tricked into thinking that biofuel will solve more probelms than it causes, but I'd also like to see more realistic predicitons and suggestions on how to implement and use these emerging technologies, as I'm getting a bit sick of the hype.
2 comments:
A recent article in one of the free newspapers (maybe the Metro) was about different environmental companies in Sweden that were gaining international interest. In that article there were mentions that while solar energy is great for places like Australia, or the southwestern United States it just won't work very wel here. The article then went on to say that wind and water power would be much more effective in Sweden. There are actually companies that offer personal wind generating power sources that are meant for small houses. Maybe worth looking into.
Swedes are very good at developing technolgy. so it would be good to see Swedish companies working on this.
In Britain the focus is mostly on wind and water (wave power in particular) as this is what the country has most of.
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