Fantastic news that the South Australian premier Mike Rann announced that all government buildings in South Australia would, from July 2010, have solar panels soaking up the free photonic goodness currently going to waste. State owned residential buildings will have a minimum of 1.5kW and other govt. buildings will have at least 5kW of solar panels.
Banish those bare rooftops says SA's premier!
The target set for SA is better than the national target, which is also good news:
Speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference, the premier informed that the South Australian government had came up with a new 2020 energy target that will generate 33 per cent power from renewable sources. The revised target is far higher than Australia’s nationwide 20 per cent Renewable Energy Target (RET).
Realistically though: we’ve truckloads of sunshine falling on Australia. The vast hoards of backpackers washing up bright red with sunburn on beaches over the summer is proof enough of that. So I can only hope that every government building in every country with half decent sunshine does this. Solving the global energy situation is like the eating an elephant concept: you have to do it one bite at a time. Government roof space is an easy win. I blogged some time ago about the nation building money going to good use on solar in Australia and how we should use the dead space for solar generation. I’ll post up some ideas in a separate post about some possible next steps Government could take.
The other thing that could fill some of that spare rooftop space, roof gardens:
Another use for that dead space: green rooftops.
I’ll leave you with the thought that if every government building rooftop was producing electricity: it’d be at least one thing in the building producing something worthwhile. Might even make up for the hot air coming out of parliament?
[...] for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does [...]
[...] Some random future ideas on government doing solar (following on, as promised in my earlier blog about South Australia’s solar plans). [...]
[...] talked in the past about my view that government buildings should all have solar installations on the [...]