Solar Power: Big and Small

With oil prices at an all time high, an explosion of alternative energy technologies is landing. While I think that the energy of the future will look like a mutual fund portfolio, leveraging several different sources to match our energy needs, one of my favorite is solar power.

Solar power is one available power source that has few downsides. The primary things preventing its massive spread has been that the cost of panels is relatively high, and the difficult of storing power through the night. But several breakthroughs in manufacturing techniques and storage solutions have begun to significantly reduce the cost of panels.

The result? Solar devices and proposals are popping up everywhere. From big to small, solar power has a large spectrum of applications.

Big Solar

Over the holidays, I read a fascinating article in Scientific American called "A Solar Grand Plan". The article outlined a practical proposal for how we could transform the nation's electricity infrastructure to a primarily solar powered one. The entire project would take until 2050, and it would cost $420 billion. After that, a full 69% of the nation's energy would be self-produced in a clean, renewable way.

$420 billion is a significant chunk of change, no doubt. But $10.5 Billion/year is an insignificant figure when compared to the spending the US incurs importing foreign oil (appx: $50 Billion/year).

The article covers how we might store solar energy to generate power at night by using the solar power to pump compressed air into underground caves, releasing it at night to spin turbines. It addresses the massive square footage we'd need in the sunny southwest to create these solar farms, and contests that there is plenty of unused, unviable land available for the project. It even discusses the transformation of our grid from AC to DC and why that is necessary.

While I'm sure there are buried complexities and problems, on the surface, it seems a viable, possible solution that addresses our energy crunch before its too late. What we now need is to build popular support for an initiative like this.

Little Solar

Micro solar solutions were everywhere this year at CES. My husband, who is always ahead of the curve, gave me one of the featured solar devices for Christmas. It's called Solio, and it's an adorable little thing.

In addition to its sleek aesthetic (available in black, silver, and pink), it's a fantastic little device that helps you create energy to charge your devices, and provides the additional utility of being a little portable power pack.

The past few weeks I've let it sit in the window of our apartment, gently charging up during our overcast days, and have succesfully charged our cell phones, ipods, and GPS devices from it. One of the benefits is that its imminently portable. I am envisioning future vacation scenarios where we are roadtripping, or on the beach, running low on power for our devices, and can whip out our Solio to charge it up.

Amazon reviews on reliability are mixed, but mine has been working as advertised for the last month. You can purchase the Solio for $66 at Amazon.com.