Georgia looks for sunny future with solar energy options
By Josh Green
Staff Writer
ATLANTA - Energy independence was a pervasive theme throughout the presidential campaign season. For that matter, because of oil and gas shortages in the 1970s and the record price oil reached this summer, it's actually been a part of the nation's vocabulary for nearly 40 years.
Despite the continued rhetoric about a need to wean ourselves off of oil, America is still heavily reliant on foreign crude and far from being energy independent.
But Radiance Energies' CEO James Marlow thinks over the coming decade that will change. And he's hoping that utilizing and embracing technologies related to the biggest natural resource the world shares - the sun - will become a big part of that mix.
"Fifty percent of everything we spend in America goes to energy," Marlow said. "Solar energy is clean, renewable, free, and it makes a lot of sense."
According to Marlow, Georgia gets about five working solar hours per day on average. That is in contrast to Germany, the largest user of solar power in the world, which Marlow says gets an average of two working solar hours per day.
From that simple statistic, one can see that the future potential for using solar power in Georgia is almost limitless.