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Asked by beth5000 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 24 Jun 2013.
Question: Is solar energy/photovaltaics likely to be the way all household are fueled?
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Claire Lee answered on 24 Jun 2013:
Solar energy is good, but it’s quite expensive to get installed. Plus, it’s not going to be so useful in a place like the UK where you don’t get much sun. It’s a good start though, and getting onto renewable forms of energy is going to have to be a process, where we slowly stop using one type of power, and start using another.
But my feeling is that different places will have to come up with different combinations to make sure they all get enough power all year round.
Here’s a pretty cool way to start: http://earthship.com
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 25 Jun 2013:
I think there is so much sunlight that hits the earth its only a matter of time before we will be able to harvest it much more effectively. There are some ideas out there to put massive solar panels in space and beam the energy back as lasers. Also, some more down-to-earth work is going on to make panels respond better to scattered cloud (a real headache for solar panel people). What we need is solar panels on our houses and buildings, but a back up system too, to get us through long dark winters so many of us have.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:
It will definitely form part of the answer but as Claire said, it will take several sources. The biggest problem with solar power, apart from the fact that it only works during the day, is that it only captures a fraction of the light that shines on it.
A huge amount of research is going into improving the efficiency of solar cells, especially with chemists designing new molecules to capture the energy. However, progress is slow and there’s no clear right answer to make the technology better.
There are so many creative ideas for getting energy out there, something will work, or we’ll come up with something new. (My personal favourite is the cows).
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