Think Different, Think Sustainability
Back in 1999,a group called the Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU) calculated for the Government that the ‘practicable’ amount of solar power which could be generated in the UK by 2025 was 0.5 terawatt hours. Fast forward to 2015 and solar power generated over 7.5 terawatt hours – 15 times as much as predicted, a decade earlier than predicted.
I can’t find the ETSU report online (wonder why?), but reading the huge amount of material that quotes it, it appears to be based on the amount of south facing roof area (whether this includes industrial sites, I don’t know) and doesn’t appear to take into consideration, say, solar farms or solar facades. I would guess that the plummeting cost of solar with rising demand wasn’t factored in either. The point is not to rub the authors’ noses in it, but rather that this report was often quoted in early 21st Century diatribes about the ‘madness’ of trying to rely on renewable energy in general – and solar in particular. And they were dead wrong.
And now we have companies like Solaroad producing significant amount of solar energy from somewhere most of us wouldn’t have looked for it – a cycle path (see photo). Just 70m of path generated enough energy for 3 houses. Multiply that up by potential cycle path coverage (plus pavements and roads?) and you’re starting to see another potentially chunky, but unexpected, contributor.
How many other SolaRoad-type ideas are there out there? Nobody knows. But we shouldn’t fall into the trap of putting artificial constraints on our sustainability ambitions on the basis of what we know now. Because the one thing we do know for sure is that we don’t know very much!