The world's first solar powered nation

[recumbenteer]

The Vatican is going solar powered. Not only will it become the world's first country to meet all of its electricity needs, the 100MW array they are installing will give them enough generating capacity to export to neighbouring Italy.

I think that's pretty exciting.

Comments

[krjalk]

It is. It really is.

But there's a small part of my ex-altar boy soul that wishes it was somebody else rather than Pope Voldemort's fiefdom.

[krjalk]

Sometimes we need organisations like churches to go out on a limb and do a proof of concept implementation.

The LDS Church for example, are world leaders in data backup and recovery technology. They believe they'll need all their family history records on the day of judgment, so the servers are designed to withstand divine retribution.

Several orthodox jewish communities have developed elaborate UPS systems to honour their commandment to rest on the sabbath. Buildings such as hospitals charge up batteries six days a week, on the sabbath they flick over to battery backup.

And the Amish have developed all manner of kitchen implements that run on compressed air so that they don't have to be connected to the English world via the power grid.

That said I still feel that you'd prefer it had been Monte-carlo, Angora, Lichtenstien or the Hutt River Provence - anyone other that the Vatican.

[tcpip]

That is pretty awesome.

And now for the bleedin' obvious question.. Why not Australia? We're hardly short of sunlight...

[recumbenteer]

Its not the sun resource that's the limiting factor, its the transmission losses between the solar array and the end user.

Perhaps its all those evil rent seeking parasitic landlords who artificially inflate the price of land near the cities that are to blame. :-)

Still, a process that involved a solar array to generate heat energy, that could be stored as chemical potential energy in reversible reaction - stable at room temperature, low mass, low volume compound.... That could get around the rent problem.

[tcpip]

We could start small.. You know, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Darwin. They seem to have sufficient irradiation to make it cost-efficient. May even give some of these "small towns" the economic boost they need.

[tcpip]

Of those towns Darwin is the best candidate.
There airport is smack bang in the middle of town and is government land (its an airforce base).
That means there is lots of land close to the city that's not good for residential because of the aircraft noise.
There's the chance that glare from solar cells might be a problem for incoming aircraft, but otherwise, Converting Darwin to Solar could be a winner.

[ltempt]

Obviously not for heating though - otherwise how would one know when a new Pope had been selected?

[recumbenteer]

I dunno - there are many electronic devices that let the 'magic smoke' out if your wire them up wrong.

[anthanum]

whatever happened to the solar chimney idea?