Indeed, I've become the first back garden farmer in history to grow horizontal onions due to the wind out here. Seriously though, its very frustrating to see massive opportunities like this go to waste.

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Ecoguy, they will soon be given the opportunity to change that state affairs with the S of I energy Co operative. Public ownership of our energy future is what is offered, further details from S of I in mid September

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Regards, Pat Gill
My posting name does not indicate my political views
labourure or greenure, do not have the same ding.

Extremely cheap printed electical solar panels with a 40%-50% efficiency which can be placed on the sides of walls, integrated onto tiles or even along footpaths would have a big impact here too. Imagine a solar panel along the entire length of the Cork to Dublin railway or integrated into a chunk of your patio tiling. Cheap to produce, cheap to set in place - no more chunky and expensive silicon-based panels that have to be hauled up to your rooftop at considerable expense.

They're not there yet but they are working on this all over the world. If they crack it - and all the signs are that they will - solar will kick many of our problems to touch. Windpower might be looked back on as a fad and a big PR stunt.

Solar is a long way from that level of efficiency, and is still extremely expensive by comparison with any other renewable technology. The best efforts in solar are the collecting towers they are putting together down in Spain, which would be fairly useless in Ireland. Also your road tiles idea runs into distribution difficulties, unless you wanted to run a HVDC line down every street in the country, with sub stations every couple of kilometers. You could build an Irish space programme for that kind of money.

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Silicon solar cells are currently at 18% efficiency in general and have reached 22% efficiency, organic solar cells have reached efficiencies of 7%. Quantum dots promise to achieve mulitples of that 7% using broad-spectum collection and cheap, flexible materials. Enormous work is being done on this and work is making prgress consistently and impressively. The cost for silicon alone is coming down all the time, now down to around $1 per watt retail - it needs to be $0.5 per watt to be equally competitive with large-scale power generation. Organic materials, print fabrication and nanotechnology mean that these prices will be obliterated over the next 20 years and solar will easily beat current power generation prices.

None of that deals with your distribution problems though. Also solar panels have some fairly nasty byproducts of production. Long term they definetely have a future, especially in your more equatorial regions, but in Ireland and similar locales wind will be king, in my opinion.

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I think not, solar will be king, both pv and thermal. I'm not up on the distribution difficulties, I usually follow the science and costs of the cells themselves rather than the cost of large-scale distribution. Most of what I envisage above relates to home and community solar power generation which will be local and make most households energy independent or damn close to it. On the larger issue of solar power generation at a national level and for industry I take your point. I am aware that carbon nanofibres are reaching ever greater lengths and have the ability to transfer electricity with little to no power loss, thus the distribution systems we are familiar with these days are also going to undergo total transformation throughout our lifetimes. I am not familiar with the details though.

Erm, do you live in Ireland? Half the year we get sunlight for less than half the day, midwinter you'd get more power by hooking up your pet hamster to a dynamo. So you've got all this investment for something that might produce something vaguely approaching its true efficiency for maybe a third of a year, assuming clear weather? In Ireland? Plus we're on a steep angle of inclination here so unless you are putting your panels on poles...

The lengths they have got them to would not be visible to the naked human eye, in fact you'd have a hard time spotting them under an electron microscope. And the processes they are using to get them to those lengths are not something you can scale up to industrial levels. Also you are missing the vast capital costs involved in something like upgrading the entire electrical grid of a country. Good enough is the best you're going to get for a long time to come.

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On the contrary, carbon nanotube yarns have been spun to a length of half a kilometre. The accelerating pace of research and development in nanotechnology is mindblowing. Most people in Ireland have very little clue about nanotechnology if they've even heard of it at all. The developments in science at the current time are breathtaking. I'd recommend anyone with an interest in technology or an interest in how technology is going to affect our economy, politics and lifestyles to spend a few hours googling the issue, including some of the more technical sites, to have their mind blown. Nanohub.org is a good website for the more technically-minded, esepcially the 'nano 101' audio and video tutorials under 'Teach & Learn' in the left menu.

Insolation levels in Ireland are comparable to Germany where solar is considered viable.

Take the Dublin-Cork railway line, it's about 220km long. Say a 1 square metre panel all along the length of that line, that's 220,000 square metres of solar panel. Quite modest in fact, Germany is currently installing 1 million square metres of solar panels annually.

Anyway, the annual average insolation across Ireland is around 2.5 kw/h, or 2500 watts per hour. Let us take a conservative estimate and imagine our solar panels are 30% efficient. So 220,000 x 2500 x 0.3 = 165MW capacity. Quite respectable, that would make it our 8th largest generating plant. Of course 50% efficiency would be more impressive and if we could squeeze 2 square metres of panels the length of the line it would be even better - at 550MW it would be our 4th largest generating plant. No doubt there'd be variations due to topography and angle of the sun but you get the idea.

I'm not an expert so perhaps my calculations are wrong, particulary regarding the kw/h to MW conversion so I'd welcome some input on this.

If the above is accurate then we can imagine the same applied to all the other railway lines, large parts of the road network, footpaths, walls and roofs and so on. Clearly, at the right price, the energy crisis is more easily soluble than many are currently led to believe.

High altitude wind generators could supplement this if needed and greater efficiencies in electrical appliances and transmission systems would also greatly reduce power usage without affecting the quality of those systems.

These are all perfectly forseeable over the next 20 years, a great amount of work is being done on it by teams worldwide. Indeed the above might be the more probable scenario.