We’ve had heat waves before, but the current one, affecting almost the entire country, is unusual. It’s providing a lesson that will probably be ignored, as lessons often are. The lesson is in the paradox: that during heat waves energy companies are stressed, and that the hotter it gets the more stressed they are because of increased demands created by people trying to stay cool. In St. Louis, hot in any summer, the problem was compounded when a powerful storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers. Is this heat wave and the accompanying severe weather another symptom of global warming? We’d be foolish to think it isn’t.
Where it’s hot, the sunshine is merciless. And this is part two of the paradox — for in all that blazing sunshine is boundless energy that could be captured and used to power all those air conditioners that are draining every power grid in the country. Solar panels on a rooftop could meet the needs of an individual home. Large arrays of them in the deserts out west could help Arizonans stay cool.
The irony is, if we’d been using solar technology since the late 1970s, when President Carter first installed a solar water heater on the White House roof (and mandated more fuel-efficient cars while we were at it), we might not be having this severe heat wave now.
Liberal Buzz 