Petersview is powered exclusively by solar energy and always has been. Over 20 years ago my late wife Denise and I made the decision to devote the property now called Petersview entirely to off-grid solar energy. it was a decision that changed our lives and certainly one we never regretted. Recently a friend suggested I write an article for a local news magazine called Mannum Mag. Here is a copy of that article.

“I refer to Jacqui Merckenschlager’s excellent article in August about the current energy controversy. Every day the energy reaching the earth’s surface from the Sun is 10,000 times the current global energy demand! So why do we worry so much about keeping our energy intensive systems going? We’re literally surrounded by energy! Obviously we need to capture it and turn it into a form we can easily use, particularly electricity. We also need to store it for use when the sun goes down.

At present we’re doing both very poorly and inefficiently I’m afraid! To begin with we’re collecting only a fraction of the energy directly from the solar source. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute 80% of global energy use comes from burning fossil fuels!

Our energy use can be divided into two main categories. Fuel for transportation and electricity for just about everything else. Of all the fossil fuels we use, 30% is petroleum while 60% is coal and gas for electricity. The future will inevitably require an increase in electricity production, along with the need for more and better storage capacity. The two go hand in hand.

Let’s start with collecting the sun’s energy. Currently we’re doing that on a very small scale. Only10% of our electricity use is generated by solar (photovoltaic ) panels in Australia, one of the sunniest places on earth! Photovoltaic cells are just one way of capturing solar energy. As Jacqui said, Concentrated Solar Thermal is another, along with indirect methods like Wind Power and Tidal energy. Like many other people I have set up my own property with a stand-alone solar system which comfortably supplies all my electrical power needs, so I’ll focus on solar panels.

Photovoltaic cells use the Sun’s energy to directly generate electricity by capturing visible light which constitutes approximately 40% of the energy reaching the ground. Most of the rest (About 50%) comes as infrared radiation which existing cells can’t use. But it is possible to generate electricity using infrared and right now scientists all over the world (Including in Australia at the University of NSW) are coming up with innovative ways of doing so, by creating cells from different combinations of minerals, which will give us two ways of broadening our use of solar radiation. First by using more of the daytime energy and secondly by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth back to space at night. This will also help to minimize our need for expensive battery storage.

Of course we will still need storage capacity, but the battery systems we currently use are obsolete. Even Lithium batteries are undergoing intensive global research to address this issue. Some alternatives, including the thermal systems referred to by Jacqui, along with pumped hydro are already in use. Others will be here long before Mr. Dutton’s nuclear reactors!

So to put it bluntly, we do not have an energy problem – we have a thinking problem!
Peter J Meech

Murray Bridge

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