Solar power is social power

Solar power is already social power – affordable for everyone and for every woman, rich or poor. Solar systems are already a global megatrend. The purchase is worthwhile financially and even more so for the environment and the climate.

Solar systems are constantly becoming cheaper and they are completely tax-free. In terms of energy, they are much more efficient today than they were 15 years ago. You can save up to 80 per cent on electricity costs. And even more tomorrow. This applies to everyone in every country in the world – especially the poor.

I have seen the happiest solar power operators in poor countries such as India, Bangladesh, Somalia and Mali. In Congo, an electrician who was unemployed and wanted to flee to Europe told me: ‘I now have some solar panels on my hut. Now the young people in my village come to me to charge their mobile phones and laptops. As a result, I also have a job and an income and I no longer think about fleeing to Europe. What luck that I can stay in my home country thanks to solar power. What an opportunity for a better world in which no child has to starve and no one has to flee.

In Abu Dhabi, a group of German climate journalists has just learnt how the Arab countries that got rich on climate-damaging oil are gradually switching to solar energy and the export of solar hydrogen, thereby making a contribution to global climate protection – at least in the long term. The world’s largest solar plant was inaugurated in Abu Dhabi at the end of 2023. Around four million solar modules were installed on an area of 21 square kilometres. According to the operators, they can supply 160,000 households with electricity and avoid 2.4 million tonnes of CO2. The modules rotate with the sun and are kept free of sand and desert dust with the help of robots. The plant is to be quadrupled in size by 2030 and will then generate 14 gigawatts of electricity. That is equivalent to more than ten nuclear power plants.

Solar energy has reached its tipping point worldwide

We will develop a completely new idea of the meaning of our existence if we embrace this new energy dimension: we are on this planet to help preserve creation. So that our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren can also lead a beautiful, good and happy life here. What a vision! We need our old sun for a new and better world. A life full of bliss with the sun. The light of the sun can become a new way of being for people.

The power station at home

There are sunnier countries than Germany. But even here in Germany – at least in theory – we can generate around a hundred times more green electricity than we currently consume. Solar and wind power are also being used more and more. In 2023, 14.1 gigawatts of photovoltaics were installed in Germany, almost twice as much as in the previous year. According to the German government, this is just the beginning, or rather the new beginning, of the solar boom, which was criminally neglected by previous governments between 2012 and 2023. A ‘solar package’ passed in the Bundestag on the 34th anniversary of Chernobyl (26 April 2024) is intended to spur the further solar boom. Germany now needs to achieve its climate targets: More storage facilities, new power lines, large heat pumps and other steel plants as well as enthusiasm for citizen-owned energy and finally a real reduction in the bureaucratic red tape.

Mini power plants are already available for just a few hundred euros. A real saving for consumers. In future, your roof or balcony will earn money or at least save money. In future, you won’t have to buy what you harvest yourself almost free of charge from your old electricity supplier. This business is to be made easier in future by removing a number of bureaucratic hurdles. It will no longer be necessary to have a digital electricity meter. The old electricity meter can run backwards instead. This is now even possible in over-bureaucratised Germany. In future, more solar systems are also to be installed on apartment blocks so that a ‘communal building supply’ is possible. Solar power can be utilised on a pro rata basis.

Landing area for the sun

The larger the roof, the more landing area for the sun. The roofs of factory buildings and supermarkets are also to be utilised more than before. Aldi wants to build 120 new supermarkets completely climate-neutral and with the environmentally friendly building material wood. The feed-in tariffs for solar power will become more attractive. Farmers are to be persuaded to secure a second income from the sun by installing solar systems five metres above their fields. Farmers will become energy producers through biogas plants and agri-photovoltaics. Wind turbines are also to be approved more quickly than before. Chancellor Scholz: ‘Instead of eight years, an approval period of eight months is also possible’. The ‘solar package’ is a milestone for the energy transition in Germany.

The solar world revolution that has now begun could be the first truly peaceful global revolution of all time. The great revolutions in world history have all been full of violence and brutality. The Russian Revolution in 1918 cost the lives of around eight million people, the Chinese Revolution from 1949 to the Communist Cultural Revolution in the 1960s claimed more than 60 million lives and the French Revolution in 1789 and the reign of terror of the Jacobins afterwards claimed up to 300,000 lives. Not to mention the psychological damage caused by these orgies of violence. And the industrial revolution brought us the climate crisis through the fossil-fuelled energy industry. Our world today is therefore full of crises, wars and conflicts over energy. For decades, Germany was dependent on Russian gas, which led to us co-financing Putin’s wars. Many people regret this dependence today.

A question of reason

Climate protection should actually be a rational matter. After all, we are living in a time of extreme weather disasters, with sea surface temperatures in February as high as in July and more heat-related deaths every year. It makes economic, ecological, ethical and health-related sense to protect the climate, which is the basis of our existence. But despite this, the expansion of fossil infrastructures through liquefied natural gas terminals, which will continue to pollute the climate for another 50 years, will still be pushed ahead in Germany in 2024. Can we still be saved? Perhaps!

The hard-nosed financial interests of fossil fuel lobbyists still seem more important than the future of our children and grandchildren. The climate crisis is calling into question the generational promise that the future is better than the past. The climate crisis is still not making us more rational, but more irrational. If we finally want to learn to be more rational, we need to be bolder, more consistent and quicker than before in venturing into the solar age. This is not witchcraft, but simply a question of common sense.

Source

Franz Alt 2024 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator