Much More Affordable Solar Panels Will Build a Sustainable Future
Posted on March 28, 2022
Affordability is one of solar energy’s biggest issues because the materials its technology uses are costly and requires specialist teams to ensure they function properly. Thus, scientists consider solar panel builds with much more affordable and accessible material as part of their prime objectives to introduce sustainable energy production in the world.
One of these initiatives is using a satellite dedicated to energy production that beams down solar energy to its host structure for the world to use. Alternatively, many scientists explore the possibilities of perovskite in fulfilling silicon’s role because the latter’s properties include being highly expensive and cumbersome for most roofs. Additionally, roofing companies have jumped into the fray, with GAF leading the world with its Timberline Solar Shingles that any professional roofer can effectively install.
Innovation is necessary to introduce the world into a sustainable future, and it will require dedicated and exemplary minds to make sure it reaches countries and demographics that need it the most. Majority of solar energy production in developing nations still use coal and gas-powered systems, causing detrimental damage to the planet in the future if left unattended.
Bloomberg has an excellent post about the disparity of using solar energies. Learn more about them below.
Sometime this year a worker will plug in an historic solar panel. Whether on a small rooftop or in a sprawling desert array, that panel will put the world over the edge of the first terawatt of capacity to produce electricity from the sun.
Projects installed at the beginning of this century were measured in kilowatts. A thousand of those make a megawatt. Multiply by a thousand again and it’s a gigawatt—a scale that some of the biggest solar farms can now hit. Getting to a terawatt, made up of 1,000 gigawatts, took the world more than two decades. The next one will come in a fraction of that time.
The world achieved this scale by racing to cut costs. Generous subsidies in Europe and the U.S. pushed companies to ramp up manufacturing. Low-cost production took root in China. These factors have transformed wind and solar from one of the costliest ways to make electricity into the cheapest in most of the world.
But access to clean power has been a relative luxury. The world’s five biggest economies—the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, and the U.K.—are home to less than half the global population. Yet they possess about two-thirds of the solar panels and wind turbines, according to clean-energy researchers at BloombergNEF. Those nations absorbed more than 40% of new solar capacity added last year and more than 45% of wind.
Exclude China, where the government has driven a world-leading build-out of clean energy, and those four wealthy countries’ share still amounts to over a quarter of all the wind and solar added last year. That they have a head start is only appropriate; they house just 7% of the world’s people but produce about 20% of its greenhouse gas emissions. (Continue reading here to learn more)
