Why Solar Energy in Kansas?
Solar energy is naturally democratic. Like rain, it falls on your house and mine. And unlike coal or natural gas pipelines, it’s hard for monopolies to corner the market. Of course, sunlight is intermittent, but it’s also quite reliable on 98% of the hottest hours of the year. These few critical peak hours demand a powerline system so overbuilt that 50% of its capacity sits unused for the other 85% of the year. Rooftop solar makes it possible to generate this peak where it is used, taking heat stress out of the whole system. This allows utilities to extend the working lives of all their hardware and focus on selling what makes them money: windfarm baseload electricity.
Solar cells can be easily built onto roofs, walls, or ground-mounted frames and have:
- no moving parts,
- produce no greenhouse gases,
- no radioactive waste or bomb-grade materials.
The sun’s energy can be stored in many ways, fed back into electric lines, or used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. It is the first populist source of energy since firewood. As the United States chooses, other nations will follow.
Our hope with this website is to help explain how solar panels work on your home or business or how distributed arrays work to benefit your non-profit municipal or cooperative utility.