The Sun Shines Everyday!

Before I start, first I am again sorry I always lag on updates but those who are regulars know this so you’re used to it. Second,  this is a looooong post.  It’s something I’m passionate about and I feel it can’t be stated enough.  Sorry for going on and on but this is one of the first ideas I ever had for writing on this blog and I went through far more effort than I do on any of my other posts.  I hope you all find it entertaining or at the very least informative.

The date is June 22, 2010.  The sun is shining, the air is clean, people are safely swimming in the gulf of Mexico and in the distance is a skeleton of the now obsolete oil derrick that years ago had pumped its last barrel and left the rest of the once profitable natural resource where it belongs, underground.  But alas this is not the case.  Instead, the Gulf is slowly filling up with oil, the coastline over the next couple of years will be destroyed, local ocean and wild life will take a huge hit which may never recover,  the price of oil will rise, and despite this HUGE ecological disaster BP will still probably make a profit.  Why do the two scenarios differ so much?  Why can’t we have the first one over the second?  Why do we allow this to continue to occur?  The answer is only so obvious, BECAUSE OUR GENERATION SUCKS!

Each year our dependence on fossil fuels grows and as consumers we are forced to watch at the pumps as the cost for this dwindling resource goes up, powerless to change or stop it.  And now in light of this recent ecological disaster we must idly sit by and watch as not only do costs go up but the price becomes even bigger than a simple dent in our wallets.  Wildlife and the earth itself pays the price for our dependence on this 20th century energy source.  Each year we must monitor our carbon emissions,  watch as the numbers become greater and greater and we all scurry to find just little ways to curb the every growing percentage of our carbon emissions.  And all our efforts are in vain because for every little way we dial back the percentage, others dial it up in an effort to make money on our conservation.  If only there was some easy, clean, efficient, and unending supply of energy.

But wait, there is!  The sun dumb ass!  The last time I checked the sun shines everyday.  That’s right solar power is the best and cleanest natural resource that could not only sustain our ever-growing energy needs, but could provide us with more power than we would ever need and revolutionize the world we live in.  Gasoline in 30 years could easily be a thing of the past.  The combustible engine could become obsolete, cars that run on gasoline would become novelty items or purely luxury items enjoyed by those who are nostalgic for the good ol’ days when we payed for overpriced gasoline rather than for cheap, clean and affordable energy.  We could produce so much energy we’d be allowed to waste it and wouldn’t be concerned with turning off the lights when you leave a room, you could leave your computer on all day without worry, and summers would be a lot cooler when it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to run your AC.

Since the mid 1950′s people have slowly been developing and finding uses for solar energy.  The first computer was designed only a decade earlier and look how far that has come today.  In the past 20 years computer technology has taken HUGE strides going from a home computer being a luxury item, to becoming an everyday necessity.  Computers in 50 years  have gone from over glorified calculators that occupied a building (correction the building was the computer), to fitting in the palm of your hand and doing a million more functions than the building ever could.  Where as in 1980′s they were putting little solar cells on calculators and watches to power them and today they make the same products with the same solar cells that produce only 1-2% more power than their earlier counterparts.  Imagine if the same effort in improving computers over the last half a century had gone equally into solar power.  Today we’d be able to make a solar cell that could power a house and the one next to it (a bit of an exaggeration but solar cells would be at least twice as efficient as they are today).

So why haven’t we done this yet?  Why do waste our time pumping sludge out of the earth?  Because apparently it isn’t cost effective yet, which in my mind is a crock of shit.  Take for example the oil rig that BP built, then blew up, and was  dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf of Mexico causing huge lasting ecological effects and will cost billions of dollars to reverse.  That rig cost just over a half a billion dollars to build and today the cost of that rig grows hourly.  Now take North America’s largest solar-electric plant completed in 2007 located at Nellis Air Force Base in the desert of southern Nevada.  That plant cost only 100 million to construct and if anything were to go wrong, say it blew up like BP’s oil rig, you know what lasting damage and cost it would create?  NOTHING!  We’d be down one solar-electric plant.  No dead seagulls or seals, no endangered animals threatened, no satellite picture showing us just how bad it all really looks from space.  And that isn’t the only non-cost effective technology employed for generating power we use today.  Nuclear power plants cost up to 7 billion dollars just to construct and only provide 20% of North America’s power needs whereas for that kind of money we could build 70 solar plants the size of the one in Nevada and though they may not provide as much power, again if anything goes wrong you’re down one solar-electric plant.  Whereas Nuclear plants have FAR GREATER negative impacts regardless if something goes wrong or not due to nuclear waste which the plant will generate daily.

So how much solar power would it take to sustain us you ask?  The answer may shock you.  If we were to cover all the necessary space on earth with solar plants to meet the world’s energy needs, we would have to occupy .9 of a percent of the earth’s land mass.  That’s right, less than one percent of the earth is needed to power the entire earth with solar power.  Not only that, these plants could all be placed on parts of the earth where there are no people.

Can't really see it here but if you click on the map you'll see the little orange squares are where and how large solar plants would need to be all adding up to less than one percent of earths land surface

No more eye soars, no more loud humming power plants, and most importantly no more worrying about the negative impact of our power needs.  To improve the situation we don’t even need to put these plants in deserted parts of the world.  Imagine no rolling blackouts or transformers overloading leaving you without power for hours or even days.  Surprisingly we actually have the best place to build a solar plant, right over our heads.  Cities could be the power plants; homes, businesses, buildings, even parking structures all could have solar cells on top of them and last I checked, USA’s cities alone cover more than 1% of the earths total landmass.  And what would be the cost?  Probably no more than the total cost of the Iraq war (That’s still going on right?  It didn’t end over night and someone just forgot to tell me?).

So in 30 years all the troubles, road bumps, headaches, and eye soars of today’s “modern” power generating techniques could all be a distant memory.  Hell today we could have already had that memory if we had devoted any significant time or energy to working off of fossil fuels in the past.  But instead people resort to being the easily led sheep that they are.  Even though they can see a good idea in front of them they’re too stupid to do anything about it.  People are constantly fooled by the magician that has you staring at his right hand while the trick unfolds in his left.  That’s why today we have a car that barely gets 30 mpg but goes 0-60 in 3 seconds.  Because despite all the technological strides we have made and can make, we choose to stay living in the past.  People choose to live in the 20th century world with its 20th century solutions to 20th century problems.  Our nostalgia keeps us as a society stuck in the past day in and day out and illustrates clearly why OUR GENERATION SUCKS.