Home Solar Panels Light Up Remote Areas and Outer Space

Home solar panels are showing up in cities, in towns, on your remote cabins, and not surprisingly on Indian Reservations. It may be surprising to some that in the 21st Century there are large swatches of land belonging to Native Americans that have no access to electricity. The power of the sun can radically change the landscape without adding to the carbon footprint of these areas and allowing the animals to live and graze in a clean environment.

A recent report on Nevada Public Radio highlights the sad fact that as many as 18,000 Navajo homes are still without electricity. The report suggests that a barrier to expanding the grid is dollars and sense, that it can cost up to $50,000 to extend the grid by just one mile.

According to the report, one resident on the Navajo land “stored his food in an ice chest or hung it from the eaves of his roof so it wouldn’t spoil. Now he has a refrigerator. He opens the freezer to show off where he stores his food. It’s filled with meat.” The only downside, says the resident, is when it is a cloudy day.

The China Post describes a remote village of the Skadang and Huhus tribes that has recently adopted solar. According to the report quoting a local tribesman, “This is a forgotten land which neither Thomas Alva Edison nor Chunghwa Telecom … can reach.”

The Washington Post has stunning pictures of a valley far off the beaten track in Southeaster Sicily. The photojournalist chronicles a bucolic life of one family in a remote home that operates on wind turbines and solar panels. A computer would not be part of this family’s furnishings without power from the sun.

And in that remotest of remote areas in outer space, there would be no space program, there would be no celebrating the 25thanniversary of the Hubble Telescope without the massive array of 25 foot solar panels.

According to Information Week, among the many discoveries of Hubble is “finding the age of the universe — 13.7 billion years old, in case you were wondering — four moons around the dwarf planet Pluto, the first organic molecule discovered on a planet outside our solar system, and the rate of expansion of the universe.”-none of which would have been possible without the power from the solar panels.

From Indian Reservations to outer space, the power of solar energy has profoundly affected the world in which we live.