Solar Power Implementation

I was fascinated to learn that tents in tent cities in disaster areas can be replaced with nice sized hard sided homes with solar power for $500 a crack. The are designed by Ikea; look here   or here   or here.  What a great idea. Or better yet look at my article  0f Monday, July 22, 2013

Refugee Housing Unit (RHU): Truly a better mousetrap.

Strides in solar power have been immense in recent years. Solar cells cost much less now. According to the Mother Jones article, It took nearly four decades to install 50 gigawatts of PV capacity worldwide. But in the last 2 ½ years, the industry jumped from 50 gigawatts of PV capacity to just over 100 gigawatts. At the same time, global module prices have fallen 62 percent since January 2011. Even more amazingly, the solar industry is on track to install another 100 gigawatts worldwide by 2015—nearly doubling solar capacity in the next 2 1/2 years.

So why don’t we see more solar power? The problem it seems to be found in what is called “soft costs”: installation, permits, marketing etc.

Here is another place where we can learn from Germany. Dave Crane and Robert F. Kennedy complained about the amount of red tape solar implementation has to deal with in this country as compared to Germany, a leader in alternate energy and who has streamlined the process; this is perhaps best seen in the following chart:

I wonder why we continue to subsidize fossil fuels when we should being do more with alternate energy. (Actually I know why, lobbying by the fossil fuel industries.)

But then we can just go along burying our head in the sand about energy issues as we have been.

The must be looking for fracking sand.