The Solar Solution: How Solar Power Could Save Us from Oil

C. Abate, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Aug 20, 2008 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

In this time of political strife, rising gas prices, and all around economic and environmental discomfort, it is a wonder why we humans have not had the good sense to upgrade our power generation from technologies that are, comparatively speaking, ancient to newer, more efficient ones. Take for instance, the computer. While the basic idea has remained essentially the same, the computer has shrunk from something that once took up an entire room to something small enough to fit into a person's pocket, and during this process, the amount of things it can do has increased as much as its size has decreased.

But power generation has essentially remained the same size and shape for the last hundred years. Despite the emergency of photovoltaic, wind turbines, geothermal, and even wave renewable technologies, the old staples are still in business: coal, oil, and natural gas. With this Presidential election year in full swing, we now have a rare opportunity to use our resentment at sending billions of dollars overseas for foreign oil to shift away from these technologies into a solution that is clean, renewable, and comes from right at home.

There is a clear cut solution to the energy problem that has been sitting in front of us since the days of Nikola Tesla: solar power. Solar power is one of the few technologies safe enough and compact enough that every home could utilize. Instead of drawing power from a centralized source, thereby losing some in the transfer and creating a power grid susceptible to attack by man or nature, with solar power each home and business becomes its own power plant. Add to this a power grid which allows energy to flow freely along it, and in essence, the entire community becomes the power plant. The homes which are not generating maximum capacity take in power as needed from the ones that are, thereby overcoming solar's current shortcomings in terms of efficiency during shadow and clouds. After all, it is always sunny somewhere.

Take this a step further and roads and highways could have solar strips running alongside, feeding the power grid. Backups utilizing wind and other sources then come into play to ensure there's always enough juice for enterprising young writers to type away online.

This would quickly eliminate reliance on fossil fuels for power generation, but what about cars which feed on millions of barrels of oil to run? Fortunately, solar provides the answer here as well: the electric car. The primary drawback of the electric car is that the power to charge it must come from somewhere, and millions of vehicles leeching off the existing fossil fuel plants is no better than gas tanks. However, when the electricity to charge them comes from the decentralized solar power plant that is the local community, this is no longer at issue. The secondary drawback to the electric car being able to charge the vehicle when driving long distances, but this too is solved by simply turning the gasoline nozzle into an outlet.

And so, one very simple technology invented at the turn of the previous century can single-handedly eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, our spending money on electric and heating bills, and a source of pollution that most scientists agree is killing our planet.

Published by C. Abate

I am a software developer and small business owner in New England. View profile