Will Oremus: Fox News Experts Explain That America Isn't Sunny Like Germany

 I see that reactionry is pouring scorn upon the very idea of solar panels.

Because they are made in China, or something?  Well, the simple answer to that is to invest in making them ourselves.  Australia and Israel both have done a considerable amount of work on how to make them cheaper and make them better.

Even while we in Australia - foolishly - sell coal to China to be turned into carbon dioxide and into air pollution of other kinds, solar panels (as solar hot water systems have already done) are  popping up all over Australian suburbia, becoming so common that nobody remarks upon them anymore.

Our church has a set of them, and they are humming away nicely, sucking down energy and reducing our power bill.

All across rural and remote Australia, a set of sturdy solar panels on the roof of the shed, with a bank of batteries, and a generator (rarely used) for backup, makes much more sense than trying to attach households to the centralised grid.  

My own father, a farmer,  has what he is pleased to call his 'power shed': a large shed with a bank of solar panels on the roof. The shed functions as a workshop, a place to dry clothes during wet weather, and a garage; the power from the PV cells lights the house and runs the computers and TV and washing-machine. (Moreover, water that runs off the roof runs into a couple of large rainwater tanks, so it is in all ways a multi-purpose building).

A highly-efficient slow-combustion stove fuelled entirely by timber grown on the farm (which grows trees very well, better than it grows anything else) does the cooking and water-heating.  

But for lighting, communication, and running the washing machine, and powering the electric drill, the solar panels have made a massive difference to quality of life on the farm; which was never connected to the grid, because it is in such a location as to make connecting it to the grid impossibly expensive.

For country households, across a vast swathe of Australia, this sort of arrangement makes sense.    

For many a small Pacific Island community, likewise, solar and/ or wind power arrangements make sense...and cut down dramatically on the need to import diesel for generators.