Planet Earth Solar
Technologies and Countries

Planet Earth Solar: everything alive on Planet Earth, gets its life energy directly or indirectly from the Sun. Sun radiation is omnipresent, it is more intense near the equators and less so near the poles. It would have been better if instead of looking downward into coal mines and crude oil wells, we were looking upward to the sky for the Sun, our mighty renewable energy source

Although it is a well known fact that the Sun can provide all our energy needs, the shift toward renewable energy resources is at the very beginning. It will take time for the process to accelerate, we are still heavily invested in electricical Power Plants working on coal, crude oil and gas, we still have hundreds of millions of cars with internal combustion engine and fossils are still cheaper than solar power

What we need is the right combination of green oriented political forces and the technology development of simpler and more cost effective solar systems

Politics is driven by the will of people who are aware to the environment; technology is driven by scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Earth Solar Power Plants Technologies

The most appropriate locations for Solar Power Plants are in desert areas. A Solar Power Plant is sitting on a relatively large piece of land and it requires lots of Sun radiation. Desert land is cheaper and inherently the desert gets a lot more solar radiation; cloudy days are rare in arid area. The two competing technologies are:

Concentrated solar photovoltaic power plants

Heating Water to get high pressure/high temperature steam to drive conventional electric power turbines (power generators)

Sun is the power behind winds and wind turbines farms are becoming a viable solution for large scale electricity production. The turbines are becoming larger in capacity (1 Megawatt and more), the towers are becoming taller and the cost become cheaper. Again, desert and arid areas with adequate wind streams are good locations for wind farms. Farms in the countryside are also good as wind turbines site, usually a farm will loose only 2-3% of the area if wind turbines are installed. The farmer gets in exchange a reliable source of income for renting his land. The sites are usually scrutinized by environmentalists to make sure they don’t interfere with unique landscape features and that they don’t interfere with bird migration patterns

Solar power plants and wind turbine farms are by nature remote from the population centers, the actual consumers. This imposes added operational cost and increases the energy distribution losses due to long power lines

In attempt to get closer to the consumers, residential scale and medium scale “power plants” are available to home owners, small business buildings and suburban communities. To list a few:

residential photovoltaic power systems; a lot of research is done to reduce the price of these systems (cheaper materials, automated production lines, mass production volume). As a matter of fact, rices dropped from $5-6 per watt in 2009 when started to build this site to $1-3 per watt in 2012.

residential solar energy water heaters and solar thermal space heaters

home wind turbines for rural areas

community size wind turbines

Earth Solar Countries

World Solar development is observed everywhere. Solar Countries are countries that have awareness to solar, have proportionally to their population size a noticeable solar electric and solar thermal production capacity and that are leaders in solar and/or wind technologies

Bellow is a partial list of solar countries, the list is growing.