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| Price of a solar panel per watt against Global solar panel installations |
The chart above and the following linked articles were taken off the Treehugger website.
I’ve always been a worrywart. I mean I try not to be but in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, I cannot help wondering at the world we are leaving for our children and the generations to come.
Which is why I was heartened upon reading this article. Basically prices of solar panels have plunged from a high of $101.05 in the 1970 to $0.61 today. This has made solar panels much much more affordable. As a result, the number of solar panels being installed has skyrocketed in the past 10 years or so, to the extent that 64,892 MW of power is being generated.
I kept nosing around to see if I could find out if that was the amount being generated per year/month/week or year but to no avail. Anyway, being curious, I read a little more on other websites and found that one of the largest nuclear reactor (they have 90+ more) in the US had a capacity of about 3937MW per hour.
Without going into too much detail, it can be seen that the amount of energy being generated by the solar panels is NOT insignificant.
From another article found here.
I learnt that in 2000, wind power had a global capacity of 17 Gigawatts but in 2013 the capacity had blossomed to 318 Gigawatts. That’s nearly a 19x growth in wind power generating ability.
Solar power has witnessed similar growth with a meager 3.7 Gigawatts in 2004 to 138 Gigawatts in 2013 – a 37x growth in solar power generating ability.
I get the feeling though that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there’s a lot more room to grow for these two renewable sources of energy.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we might leave behind a livable world for our young ones.
I keep wondering though why aren’t we doing more in sunny Singapore, where the sun beats down on us mercilessly for the most part of the day, to harness solar power? We might have a small land area and much of it urbanised but what if we clad our HDB blocks in solar panels? The rooftops in solar panels?
We’ve done well to move into a decent state of water sustainability and while it is definitely a bridge too far to attain energy self-sufficiency, surely we can do more to reduce our dependency on burning oil for energy.
SGDodger 