With all the attention currently being geared towards making the planet Earth a more energy efficient and safer environment for humans to live on, solar power seems to be enjoying the most attention in Australia. Hardly surprising really because every state of Australia is blessed with an abundance of sunshine each day. Even Melbourne, the city of four seasons in one day, does enjoy some sunshine however spasmodically.
Up until this point one of the big drawbacks to solar power has been the lack of storage capacity of the electricity. Many Australians that I speak with would prefer to see more funding put towards natural power sources like solar and wind rather than millions and millions of dollars being put towards finding a clean coal solution. Even a fraction of some of these Research and Development funds given to the coal industry would go a long way towards fixing some of the known problems like battery storage capacity for solar power.
Yes, it would be nice if both could be done at the same time and save those thousands of miner's jobs. It would also be nice to be the first country to come up with the solution to the problem of clean coal burning technology, especially as Australia has such large reserves of coal. But the question has to be asked "if the coal burning industries are such viable and important industries to this country, and they are such a revenue producing business, why aren't the coal mining companies putting more resources into the research and development of the technology?" And it's not as if they have been unaware that the problem was gaining urgency. Greenpeace alone has made sure they got the message numerous times.
Solar power augmented where and when necessary by existing coal fired power stations complying with a workable emissions trading scheme, seems to be a rather obvious choice for most Australians that I have spoken with. Now, if we could leave the politicians out of the equation, we could well end up with what could be a very viable, efficient and inexpensive energy supply.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment