Tag Archives: fossil fuel economy

SOLARDAY 2011

Solar-e.com endorses and commends the efforts of John Reed in establishing SOLARDAY 2011 across the United States of America and promoting its incorporation into the calendar of other countries throughout this amazing world that is our home.

SOLARDAY 2011

SOLARDAY 2011

This type of focus is just what we need to make the general public throughout the world more conscious of the need for a 21st century solar economy as fast as possible.

For Wise Earth P/L (our parent company) and its staff and management, every day is SOLARDAY!

Therefore, we take seriously this brilliant and visionary promotional idea.  The next 20 years (up to 2030) will be the most important time for human action on Climate Change, in adapting to it and abating it in the medium and long term.

Now is the time the planning for our sustainable energy future.  There really is no choice eventually.

We are absolutely convinced through our own research via our networks of imminent experts throughout the globe, that we need to go solar as fast as possible.

Instead of burning our cheap precious fossil fuels on ‘business as usual’ type developments and maintaining the ‘old fossil fuel economy ‘as long as possible, we really need to be using this cheap energy to produce as much solar energy utilization as possible and every other year from hereon, while it is still abundant.

It then can gain a critical mass and begin to replicate itself before our cheap fossil fuel is wasted.

Solarday 2011: How to get involved

To help get the message out there about SOLARDAY, the following is a personal invitation from John Reed to be involved and a media release for SOLARDAY 2011’s events.  Also here is a list of the contributors and participants of SOLARDAY 2010’s event.

We recommend that you personally, as a non-profit, commercial enterprises and government authorities get on board with this and look at practical and effective ways of networking with solar-e to achieve exactly what this day has already become, and representing a potent symbol of the type of society and economy we need to develop.

I think that all societies and associations should get involved with this initiative.  We need cooperation and collaboration and teamwork to pull off intelligent change.

This should not be a competition!  It is our kids and grand children’s future we are helping to create.

Let’s applaud John Reed’s initiative and get on with it!

 

Garry Baverstock AM

Solarday 2011 Letter from John Reed

Solarday 2011 Media Release

Solarday 2010 Participants

SolarDay 2011 letter from Doris Matsui from the U.S. Congress

No Need for Fossil Fuel in 40 Years

24 July 2010

Ray Wills, CEO
Western Australian Sustainable Energy Association Inc. (WA SEA)
Website: www.wasea.com.au
Email: info@wasea.com.au

The WA Sustainable Energy Association Inc. (WA SEA) welcomes the Greens policy announcement today that “Australia can be a renewable energy powerhouse, harnessing our tremendous resources of sun, wind, wave, earth and human ingenuity to replace our reliance on coal with 100% renewable energy within decades”.

WA SEA, Australia’s largest energy industry chamber, agrees.

While other promises surfacing election consider modest measures for a sustainable future, the rest of the planet is consistently turning to renewable energy to provide power on a scale that is unprecedented in the fossil fuel age.

In a report released by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century on 15 July 2010, renewable generation is now 25% of world electricity generation.

Almost 50% of new generation built around the globe last year (2009) was renewable energy. Globally, about 80 gigawatts of renewable power capacity was built in 2009, compared to 83 gigawatts of fossil fuel plants.

China added almost half of the total with 37 gigawatts of renewable energy last year, making China the world’s leader in renewable energy generation.

Clean energy accounted for 60 percent of new capacity in Europe, and more than half of new power generation in the U.S.

Alternative power now accounts for about a quarter of global generating capacity, or 1,230 gigawatts out of 4,800 gigawatts.

What about Australia?

Australia averages around 8% renewable energy generation (and Western Australia about 5%).

In a year that saw almost 50% of projects in the rest of the world go renewable, as at October 2009, non-renewable electricity generation projects accounted for around 76% of planned additional capacity – according to ABARE data.

Australia doesn’t get it.

‘Australians stand on a beach looking to the sea, seeing off a coal cargo ship and ever hopeful of a new gas reserve offshore, with the sun shining down on us, the wind in our faces, the waves crashing on the shore. It appears we can’t see the renewable forest for the fossil trees,’ says Prof Wills.

‘We must fundamentally change the way we think about energy and how we do business.’

‘Traditional economic commentators and traditional politics is focussed on sticking on the well-worn path, to the middle of the road. With the rush to conservative economics, we are missing the obvious opportunity to Australian markets. Australia is the Middle East of renewable energy and we are failing to harvest the energy bonanza for the benefit of the Australian economy and that will ultimately prove to be to the advantage of Australia’s export industries,’ says Prof Wills.

‘Our nation must ramp up use of Australia’s massive renewable energy resource for the benefit of the economy and all Australians.’

‘We need to take action; the rest of the world is already ahead. Renewable energy sources that will dominate generation in every nation in the 21st Century because renewable energy will deliver on both energy security and on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions’ says Prof Wills.

Editors notes:

1. United Nations Environment Programme and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21)

2. Greens statement on 100% renewable energy by 2050 

3. ABARE’s list of major electricity generation development projects

4. The Western Australian Sustainable Energy Association Inc. (WA SEA) is a chamber of enterprises has a growing membership of over 340 industry members from a diversity of businesses. WA SEA is the largest energy industry body in Australia.

5. WA SEA bringing you the Energising SE Asia Conference 23-26 March 2011, Perth.

< Back to Blogs

What does the ‘e’ in solar-e mean?

Garry Baverstock
Co-Founder & Director, solar-e.com
Email: g.baverstock@solar-e.com

The ‘e’ usually means e-commerce on the Internet. It represents the primary goal in establishing the website over 10 years ago. However, true sustainability of this planet in addressing the threat of devastating climate change makes this ‘e’ more cognitive to the ‘e’ in enlightenment and the ‘e’ in solar economy.

It has been obvious to the founders and current management of the site that to solve the dramatic challenges ahead in the 21st century, we all need to move from a fossil fuel economy to a solar-based economy. Hermann Scheer wrote about this in the late 1990s and there have been many calls from scientists and enlightened political figures such as Al Gore, to act in a way that produces solutions.

The website is therefore focused to create enlightened self interests for those who engage with solar-e and create more ethical products and systems that enable more solar energy to be used in our lives.

For a modern economy to create a sustainable world we need more than ever, innovators and business minds need to work out diverse ways that we can use solar energy to restore a thermal balance on planet earth. Hopefully, in doing so we will allow future generations to enjoy life as we are living today.

It is obvious people and communities need to take action. Waiting for the political systems throughout the world will mean too little too late. How soon do people seem to have forgotten the lessons of history. The socioeconomic causes of WWI and WWII were the result of the  failure of governments to adapt to technological changes and population growth. Business as usual stopped working and political networking proved inadequate to prepare the populous for the changes in thinking to keep the peace.

We all need to take responsibility and action ourselves. In doing so, such action will help to gently push governments to keep pace with the changes we all need to keep the peace on planet Earth, while creating an ecologically sustainable global environment.

The directors, managers and experts involved with solar-e will be clearly defining the reasons why we desperately need a solar economy by starting to act not with the usual self-interest common to all mankind, but enlightened self interest.

< Back to Blogs