Last Saturday, First things First hosted their first Solar Fair in the Centre of Excellence at Okanagan College.
The event was well attended, to be sure, but it felt a little bit like stepping back to the 60s or 70s, when farsighted activists were pushing wind and solar power generation as renewable, responsible alternatives to increasing reliance on oil.
The 2016 version of the solar fair had a big difference from those 50 years ago. This time, the people behind the displays are professionals, suits and all, marketing mature, workable technologies to homeowners serious about lowering their energy costs and consumption.
Solar power is still a long ways from being an everyday technology, but nowadays, that has more to do with marketing and acceptance than it not living up to the promises made by those early, hopeful advocates.
The idea of powering a large building like the South Okanagan Events Centre through wind and solar power may still be years away, but it is no longer the fantasy that it once might have been dismissed as.
We don’t often talk about a looming oil crisis as we did 40 years ago, when it was projected the world would run through its carbon fuel resources by the end of the century, but despite new, better and more efficient methods of extracting oil from the ground, tar sands or deep in the Arctic Ocean, it’s going to run out one day. Or at least, become too expensive to be used as an everyday fuel for our cars or what have you.
Hopefully, long before the world does completely run out of those carbon-based fuels, we will recognize that there are alternatives — wind, solar, geothermal and more — that make more sense than burning up a finite resource.