Monday, March 20, 2006

Status of Solar Energy

I was going through an article in 'The Hindu' regarding solar energy. Its main focus was to use solar energy for street lights and also how to use it in homes to cut down on the electric bills and power problems. The main reason about power cuts is that there is an overload somewhere, that is somebody is using excessive power some place. Hence, we ourselves are slightly a reason for the power cuts. So we have to work on the problem.

It is estimated that nearly 5 lakh homes in Bangalore city consume 3 Million units of power everyday between 6 am & 9 am for water heating alone. If just 20% of the households in Bangalore switch to solar energy to heat water, about 150 MW of power will be saved during peak hours everyday. Also 75% of total expenditure of Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) goes into keeping streetlights glowing. (Courtesy to Metro Plus, the Hindu, March 20, 2006)

Water heaters are a good investment in a long run. Intially the cost will be heavy than an electric water geyser but then again we need not pay any electric bills for the water heater. The life time of a water heater is also long. So intial investment is everything. In Bangalore itself there are more than 50 companies dealing in solar water heater and will install it in 2 days period. This is just one example.

In many new types of Solar energy experimentation, a solar furnace has been created. But in this instead of Solar cells, concave mirrors are used to divert the sunlight to a single point like pointing to a top of a tower. This way large scale temperatures can be attained. One such example can be seen in France.

This is the future, where we need to use clean source of energy and sunlight is in abundance, so more practical use should be implemented. This way we can meet the demand of power generation that keeps on rising. More things like solar heaters should be implemented for human use.

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