Friday 1 October 2010

South Africa plans a solar power park

Can you live without electricity? If electricity supply is suddenly cut, how we can survive? Electricity consumption is rapidly increased all over the world. Many countries are bothering how to deal with it. According to the article,"South Africa plans a solar power park", South Africa decided to invest in a big project to solve its energy problem.

South africa plans to invest in a solar power park in order to help meet increasing electricity demands. The country has frequently experienced blackout because of its inadequate electricity supply. The solar park will generate about 11% of the country's current power capacity. At the momnt most of South Africa's electricity is generated from coal-fired power plant but they didn't choose a way to depend any more fossil fuel plants for response to global warming though the project could run into billions of dollars.

Solar electricity is not produced at night and is much reduced in cloudy conditions and cost of install solar power plant is still expensive. There are some disadvantages but the reason for pollution-free and government support, solar power panels are installed in many places and becoming popular. In the near future we will see electric cars, so electricity consumption will surely increase more. Now lots of solar power plants are planed, however installation solar power generations is the best solution for energy problem? We also need to consider why electricity consumption is increased. Electricity is necessary for our life. We can no longer live without electricity, but we can stops wasting electricity usage. Don’t you forget to turn off the light? Set room temperature too cold? To reduce electricity usage, there are so many things we can do and each of us has to take an action. We might not need more power plants.

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References

South Africa plans a solar power park. (2010, September 29) BBC News. Retrieved October 1, 2010 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11435552

4 comments:

  1. Yes, I agree with you that solar power system is too expensive for using in households and other optional power, wind or plants, also too expensive. However, that cheap price of old power, fossil or oil,is only price which you pay for use it. In fact, the social have to pay on other prices for old powers, such as the decline of the environment and migration of people who live in dam flooding zone. Therfore, if government caculate the real price of old powers and optional powers, they might be close.

    Lastly, I agree with you that new plans of power product are not last answer for solution of power shortage, but new attitude of people to not waste power is the real solution.

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  2. I certainly agree with what you say. South Africa has many area and full of nature. If this project started, many problem would follow such as to desroy forest, pollusion from construction. However, I believe that this project can be lunched surely, but management isn't easy to be done.

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  3. I agree with Poome's idea which is "new attitude of people to not waste power is the real solution", but if we still face with population increasing, we will have a problem about increase of electrical consumption. I think that two ways which might solve this problem are decreasing consumption and finding power sources. However, I thing that we might reduce the consumption,but now, we cannot reduce the consumer. Therefore, we still face with the electrical shortage. Another way is finding the new power source, and renewable energy has been becoming to be the new power source in the countries which concern about environment.

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  4. I agree more with Gift's idea that a better solution is to develop new, economic power sources, and neither solar nor wind seem likely to do that at the moment, although technological advances might make solar work. At teh moment, oil and coal are still the best options in most cases.

    I would like to see a lot more money spend on research into fusion power. Difficult as that is, if it can be made to work, it will probably solve all of our energy needs cleanly for a very long time.

    Modern life uses a lot of energy, and I don't think it's realistic to expect people to make any significant reduction in that. In fact, I think rising per capita energy use is a good sign - it generally means that people's lives are getting better, that they have more choices and live safer, healthier, more rewarding lives. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the dark old days of candle power, hand sewn clothes and no refrigerators or air conditioners!

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