PV solar panels for a crazy world

If you were unlucky enough to be living in Russia during the end of the cold war, you would have seen big changes. Those with previous wealth begging for food, KGB agents and the police abandoning their posts to protect their families and mobster rule quickly replacing the old communist authority rule.

But a Soviet Union style collapse couldn’t happen here, right?

After world war two and during the 1950s and 60s, the US and Britain were a beacon of hope for the majority of the world. Although an iron curtain had fallen over Europe, most countries of the world held us in high regard for standing up to the Nazi and Japanese oppression.

Today the majority of the world view the US and Britain as the oppressors, the evil empires and this may come as a surprise, but the close ‘special’ relationship with the US that our country is so proud of could be our undoing.

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For tens of thousands of years, the biggest worry of any community or early civilisation was men with swords on horseback. Today’s equivalent of this life-changing event is an X-flare from the sun.

Only this week the sun has been highly active, and a flurry of solar flares emanating from enlarged sunspots have given modern humanity a light show of cosmic proportions.

Although most solar flares are directed away from the Earth and usually of a lower class that cannot penetrate the planets magnetic shielding, more extensive, more intense eruptions called X-flares can penetrate the atmosphere and overwhelm us with electromagnetically charged particles. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon finding out my schoolboy nephew had got his first paid job, I realised that most of his hard-earned money spent on just mobile phone credit. What a shame, no fun stuff, just boring old phone credit. This got me wondering about the rest of us.

A paradigm shift can be as easy as looking up rather than down.

It would seem that the same situation is occurring with Mr and Mrs average homeowner and their energy bills. The big difference between the gas in your pipes and my nephew’s phone credit is phone credit has never been cheaper and still falling – whereas energy costs are on an exponential climb.

If ever a paradigm shift was needed in the way we all heat and power our homes, it would indeed be now. But history shows, such dramatic change in thinking never happens overnight, nevertheless, the drip, drip, drip of transition, always speeds up to become a deluge eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

I am proud to be an early adopter and user of the internet, and I am equally inspired by the same pioneering spirit within the solar panel industry today.

The internet then and the internet today.

Like the early internet before it, there were people ready to take advantage of new people venturing into a world of unknowns. Most pioneers can and do learn quickly and manage to avoid the pitfalls of a new landscape.

However, the same company names using salespeople from the second glazing school of salesmanship and charging disproportionate prices, sometimes more than 30 per cent more than is deemed ethical, keep cropping up.

On the positive side, this makes the lives of good solar installers more comfortable, but, such behaviour, leave people confused and distrusting of this still fledgeling industry.

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