Yes 2 Renewables spotted this gem of a letter to the editor in the Melton & Moorabool Weekly. We liked it so much we thought we’d share it with you. Here’s David Bonnici’s ‘My Shout: Heat is on the Government’
I heard Premier Denis Napthine tell ABC Radio last week we face rolling blackouts and should each do our bit to save electricity during the heatwave.
His comments almost made me throw the radio through a wall – no mean feat when you’re driving.
The sun and wind are increasing our demand for the power that our brown-coal-fired power stations can’t meet when they could be a major part of the solution.
Yet our state government has all but banned new wind farms and removed many of the incentives for people to install solar panels and deliver surplus energy to the electricity grid.
Of course, the government will feel pressure to meet increasing demands as heatwaves get longer and hotter.
Ironically, it will most probably want to do this by building another dirty coal-fired power station.
People are putting two and two together. Climate change means more extreme weather events. And the best way to avoid worse heatwaves in the future is with more renewable energy. Premier Napthine and the Coalition government will be under pressure to scrap their anti-wind farm laws and adopt a support for renewables in 2014–a state election year.
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yes2renewables.org 
I’m with Mr Bonnici on this one.
But there two elements to it.
1. The barbarians are now within the citadel and so the country is now in the hands of the Liberal Party and from here on in, we get will all the best insights of the 1950s and will have to live with that until the next election at least.
2. Out where I live, electricity just falls out of the sky.
My roof is about 100 square metres in area and yesterday, Australia Day, the sun was at about 1 kilowatt per square metre in intensity. So the radiation intensity available to me was 100kw.
During the four hours around the middle of the day, my roof received 400kwh of electrical energy. That is enough to run a dozen or so suburban houses.
I couldn’t possibly use that much but I do collect a fair bit and stick it aside for future use.
And this happens every day.
Sometimes the amount is a bit less but it is possible to design for that.
It seems astonishing to me that everyone doesn’t do it.