Solar power anyone?

What would the Wright brothers have made of the solar powered aero plane?

It’s just started a test flight that is supposed to last for 24 hours. One objective of the flight is to check out how well it flies at night. Err a solar powered ’plane flying at night? Has Graham finally lost his marbles, I hear you say? Actually I have mislaid a couple of very pretty multi-coloured glass giants, but that’s a digression. If you don’t believe me (about the solar ’plane, not the marbles) have a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10534960.stm.

It is a truly amazing machine, made using some very clever light-weight materials: presumably that’s why it looks ever so like the balsa wood constructions of my boyhood; however, it’s on a much larger scale and with four engines attached. Going back to the night flying test, the idea is that the photo-electric cells built into the wings not only provide power but recharge batteries which provide the juice to operate the controls at night. The aircraft gains height during the day, and then gives back that height (potential energy for the technical) at night using a bit of battery power only when necessary.

Now that machine makes me wonder about the potential solar power going begging in Lebanon. Go to Greece, Turkey or Cyprus for example, and all buildings have solar panels for heating water. Even in the comparatively sunless UK, more and more electricity bills are being lowered by tapping into the ultimate energy source – the Sun. So why not here? Try to eat into the gap between supply of generated electricity and the significantly greater demand. Ah, well, solar heating doesn’t work with apartment blocks, according to some. Actually it does. Technology has evolved to be able to cope with any block up to eleven floors high and the majority has eight or ten. Does Lebanon have a surfeit of Oil and Gas reserves? No, it has to import the lot. Do the mountain peaks attract enough winter snow to create lakes and waterfalls that drive hydro-electric power? Well there’s a grand scheme for some twenty-seven artificial lakes to be created by dams, but they are to meet the demand for water, any power creation would be seasonal and supplementary at best. And after twenty years, one has been completed (actually the only one to be started), because everyone is quite happy about the others being built, but not the one that takes their valley, stream or orchard – the classic NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. Solar power would eat into the electricity company’s profits? It makes a loss.

So it remains an unanswered mystery, just like the question at the start of this little piece.