End the oil age.
Salvage paradise.
Now we must live in
the grace of the sun.
Grace of the Sun is a solar powered light poem created by Scottish artist Robert Montgomery, for the UN climate conference (COP26). The artwork was constructed using 1,000 solar powered Little Sun lights and stands 11 metres wide and 5 meters tall. The giant solar light poem was illuminated every day at sunset as a poetic beacon of hope for Glasgow.
Sunlight is an inexhaustible resource, and solar power is completely renewable. Many Friends Meetings are embracing the use of solar power, including Eugene Friends, who installed panels in 2018. I revel in the thought that we are worshipping in the Light, in a building powered by the grace of the sun.
The potential of solar power seems obvious – yet solar makes up only a tiny fraction of global energy production today. Why is that?
This Forbes article has an exhaustive analysis of the pros and cons, including costs and installation questions. I’ll list a few environmental factors:
Environmental benefits of solar power:
- While fossil fuel releases harmful by products into our atmosphere, solar power is clean and renewable. Solar power has the potential to help us minimize our use of fossil fuels and the impact we have on the environment.
- It benefits our community because we can sell any excess electricity our panels produce back to the utility company, which helps the entire community reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Environmental disadvantages:
- The availability of the raw materials required to produce solar products may not be sufficient to meet future demand. Also, the mining of these materials can have a significant environmental impact – but the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy reports that solar panels pay for themselves in terms of greenhouse gas emissions within one to four years of use.
- At present, recycling options for solar panels remain limited, and solar technology contains some of the same environmentally-harmful substances in many consumer and industrial electronics, so proper disposal is critical.
