The sun will shine for another 4.5 billion years
The sun is our largest and most reliable source of energy. It sends us every second of our being here 15,000 times more energy than the entire mankind consumes today.
Astrophysicists have calculated that it will continue to do so for 4.5 billion years and another 4.5 billion years. And it does it in an environmentally friendly way, cheaply, on any roof, for all time and without toxic or dangerous waste.
This year and this summer, the failures of the energy transition so far have become particularly visible and noticeable. We are experiencing one heat record after another, forest fires in Italy, Greece, Canada, Tenerife, California and China – floods in Slovenia, Austria, Franconia and Tyrol as well as worldwide coral death and warm seas like never before. Around the Mediterranean, people are experiencing temperatures of 40 degrees and more. Our house is on fire and the energy turnaround is still going far too slowly.
But now the German government has finally passed an amendment to the law, a solar package, that makes it easier, less bureaucratic and faster to install solar modules on roofs, balconies, facades, fields and brownfield sites. Now the time has finally come: The solar age is beginning, the sun is winning.
More than 30 years ago, the Kohl government tentatively started the solar energy revolution with a 1,000-roof program. In 2000, the red-green government passed the Renewable Energy Sources Act, which has since been adopted by 80 governments worldwide. In Germany, however, this law was bloated by nine amendments and brutally bureaucratized, making it almost impossible to install a renewable system without a lawyer. Approval procedures took up to ten years and longer.
Now all that is to be approved more simply and decidedly more quickly. Tenants, craftsmen, farmers, homeowners and residential property owners can now soon get started if they want to go renewable. After all, 90 percent of buildings in this country are still without solar systems. The doubters and regulation-hungry Germany can and must now quickly rethink and act. A salutary experience is in store for us.
Farmers will become energy farmers in addition.
Anyone can buy a solar panel at the hardware store, plug it into a wall socket, produce their own electricity via a plug-in solar power plant, and save on electricity costs when the sun is shining. If there is a lot of sunshine at lunchtime, the meter can even run backwards.
Farmers can do double farming. At the bottom, they can grow vegetables or fruit on the ground as before, and four meters above that they can produce and sell electricity via an elevated agri-solar power plant. Farmers also become energy farmers. In July 2023, Germany already produced 66 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. It will be much more in the future, as the expansion of wind energy is now finally to be accelerated.
Sun and wind are the decisive energy sources of tomorrow. Thanks to electricity storage and power lines from the windy north to Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, we will soon be able to use far more renewable energy. Even when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. When onshore wind power and offshore wind power are combined, we will almost always have wind power available. Then there is the storable hydroelectric power, geothermal power, bioenergy, and wave and ocean energy. The world is full of renewable energy. We just have to learn to use the entire symphony of renewables.
If the Bundestag gives the green light in the fall, the government’s solar package can come into force in early 2024.
Source
Franz Alt 2023 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
