The solar panels on the roof of my house
I think
that every reasonable person will agree that we live in an age of global
warming and that the main cause of this global warming is the behaviour of man.
We simply use too much energy and moreover we use energy of the wrong kind:
fossil energy. In fact, fossil energy is solar energy long ago laid up in the
soil by natural processes. Probably all this energy would still have been there,
if not once, also long ago, man was added to the big number of creatures that
lived already on earth. As all creatures, also man needed energy to live, but
as long as man led a simple life, s/he lived more or less in balance with what the
earth produced. Now you may think that I’ll add: And everybody was happy. Not
true. For many people thought that life could be better, but for this they
needed more energy, not only for cooking and for heating themselves during cold
nights, but for a lot more, like better shelters, making better tools,
producing more food, waging war, etc. In the end man needed so much energy that
the immediate environment couldn’t produce enough any longer. Happily man
discovered that there was a lot of energy stored in the soil: peat, coal and
oil. That was nice, of course, but there was a problem – a problem that was
ignored by man at first, for the simple reason that s/he didn’t realize that it
was a problem: Peat, coal and oil are stored kinds of energy but at the moment
you are going to use it, it is added to the energy that is already freely
present on earth. Before man used this stored energy, the amount of freely
present energy was more or less in balance, and if it wasn’t it wasn’t man’s
mistake. But man begun to use more and more stored energy and more and more
stored energy became freely present. And so it happened that the balance of
freely present energy was upset: The earth became warmer. First the global
warming went very slowly and nobody noticed it. However, it went faster and
faster and finally it went that fast that it became impossible to deny that
global warming had become a problem. It became also impossible to deny that
there was one main cause of the problem: Man, or rather man’s energy
consumption. (As it happens, there are always people who deny that there is a
problem or who deny that they themselves are the problem. Also in this case
there are such men, but I’ll ignore them.)
But where
there are problems there are solutions, and so also in this case. Actually the
solution was quite simple: If the global warming is caused by using stored
energy, don’t use it any longer but use only yet freely present energy. So man
started to develop machines and apparatuses that caught freely present energy
everywhere on earth, and so they made things like windmills, water turbines and
solar cells. But since windmills and turbines are very big and since hardly
anybody can or wants to have them in the backyard, the state propagated and
stimulated the use of solar cells for the common man. Moreover it was made – at
least in my country – that you could automatically sell the solar cell energy to
your energy provider if you produced more than you needed yourself. Therefore
it became very profitable to have panels with solar cells on the roof of your house, for
you saved on your energy costs and you could sell your overproduction. And so,
when you walk through my little town and look at the roofs, everywhere you see
solar panels and you can see them also on my house. Moreover, everybody with
solar panels is happy, for it gives not only a clear conscience because you
improve the environment but you get also a big bank account, for having solar
cells on your roof is big money, so to speak.
When you
have money you want to spend it, or so it is for many people. Therefore, as
soon the solar panel buyers had got well filled bank accounts they asked
themselves what to do with their money. Some bought new fridges, others bought
new furniture, again others booked trips to countries far away, again others took
new cars. Thus it happened that many of those people with solar panels on their
roofs increased their consumption and bought new consumer goods. But alas, we
are still in the age that most consumption goods, also when using self-produced
energy, are made with the help of fossil energy. Moreover, many of such
products still use fossil energy as well, like the aircraft you use for your travel.
To cut a long story short: When people take panels with solar cells, soon they are going to
use more energy than before, which still is mainly fossil energy. That’s what
we see nowadays. And that’s the solar cell paradox.
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