by Patrick Boniface

Created on: November 09, 2009   Last Updated: November 10, 2009

Let's establish some facts: The sun provides for us on the Earth, gives us light, warmth and a comfortable place to live. The radiation it pumps out into the solar system can be transformed into a useful and crucially sustainable form of energy. Those are the facts folks and here comes the point where I break away from the eco lobby and strike out on a different course.

Eco warriors and fantasists will have us believe that the great glowing gas bag in the sky can provide the world with all the energy it needs, this is ludricrous and quite scary at the same time. The Earth is, the eco warriors are quite right, running out of fossil fuels and we should, again quite rightly look for alternative forms of energy and solar power is indeed just one of a myriad of possible solutions to reduce our dependence on oil.

But, as with everything in life, there are pros and cons, pluses and minus' for every single option and it is the case with solar energy. First lets have a look to see how dependent we are on oil in the first place. Almost every car, truck, van, train, motorbike, aeroplane, city centre, house central heating system and transitor radio runs on oil, if not directly then from the production of electricty.

Admittedly some generators are nuclear and others are gas fired. Very few, especially in the United Kingdom, where I write this article, are anything other than 'harmful' electricity generators. In Scotland there is a powerful lobby for hydro electric power, where the country has a large annual rainfall and mountains and lakes capable of being utilized in this fashion.

In the part of the United Kingdom I live in, there are no mountains, no lakes and precious little rainfall, so hydro-electric is not really an option here.The big snag in the viability of solar power in Scotland is the climate, grey or perhaps as the Scots would say Dreak!

Which leads me nicely onto solar energy. Everywhere on planet Earth receives an annual supply of solar energy in the form of sunlight, both in the visible and invisible wavelengths. The question is how much of this is in useful quantities and how is it viable to extract this energy?

In Kent there are no plans from local or national government to turn farmers fields into giant solar power stations because the United Kingdom is a small island and these fields serve a better purpose in providing food to sustain our ever expanding population, expected to reach over 70 million people by 2020. Added to this the climate in Kent is changeable, but mostly overcast and cloudy with sometimes heavy rain.

Over the last ten years the number of sunny days in the United Kingdom have shrunk, allegedly due to global warming, but the overfilling of my bath in the mornings has also been put down to the questionable science of global warming!

Other places on the planet, such as deserts make ideal places to build solar power stations, but suffer from the fact that they are ridiculously remote and the cost of building them would be astronomical. Paying the staff to work in those conditions, would like the temperatures, also be extremely high. The infrastrure to build a solar station, of suitable power, would be immense.

You would need to cover the whole of the Sahara in receptors to power Europe. This might be a great way of shifting the balance of power in Africa away from the oil barons to hard up North African countries but would also offer the chance to destablise the world and produce chaos.

Solar power is undeniably a great opportunity, but the technology is not sufficiently mature and the infrastrure constraints too problematic to make the necessary 'significant' change in power usage that will need to take us from an oil based future.

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