Look to the sun

In his Nov. 24 Op-ed column, “Solar not for China,” Richard Hill dismisses the use of solar energy in China as being impractical. He bases his opinion on his calculations which show that 14,000 square miles of land would be needed to collect the amount of sunlight required to generate China’s electricity. Obviously (he implies) this is an outrageously large and impractical amount of land for such purposes.

I remembered that China is rather a large place and so I paid a rare visit to my atlas and discovered that the nation’s land mass is 3.7 million square miles. I’m not sure if this includes the occupied country of Tibet, but let’s ignore that for now.

The area required to generate China’s entire electrical need using existing solar power technology is a stunning 0.4 percent of its available land mass. This is hardly an excessive amount of land for the necessity of electricity; 14,000 square miles is a square 120 miles by 120 miles. Perhaps we could spare this amount of Arizona to power the entire United States.

Some people seem to have a knee-jerk response to solar energy, feeling it is just some hippie, new age fad that will eventually go away. The fact is that sun power has provided most of the energy ever used in the world. Other than nuclear power, the sun is the only source of energy on earth. All of the fossil fuels we now burn — coal, oil, gas — were once growing plant life. The energy for that plant life to grow came from the sun. It continues to come from the sun.

Most of us in Maine burn wood for heat, and this biomass fuel gets its energy content from the sun. Direct methods of converting solar power to electricity, such as solar panels, are only part of the overall equation, and though they may never be the most important part, this technology is itself becoming more advanced, reliable and economical and should not be summarily dismissed as “niche energy.” Jarlath McEntee Castine