Article published May 6, 2008

Demand panels

Some months ago on PBS, a scientist said that if a nominal number of solar panels were installed on every home and building in North America, that would generate five times the amount of electrical energy that we currently consume. It would require no additional centralized coal or gas plants, no more nuclear plants, no additional transmission lines and no giant wind farms cluttering our landscapes. Producing and installing rooftop solar would greatly stimulate the economy, create thousands of jobs and increase national security by decentralizing energy production.

Can this be possible? If so, why not demand that government and industry make such "distributed" electricity production the nation's number one energy priority and subsidize such an effort as much as, or more than, we presently subsidize Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Wind, etc?

— Gene Sentz, Choteau