A reader of OnEarth, Charles J. Cole, wrote a letter to the editor that I thought had some great ideas. He suggested that when we focus on developing renewable energy that we need to use a multipronged approach for conservation. He then gave examples of this approach and I thought one was brilliant.
He’s from Tucson, Arizona, where he’s found that some people are starting to use rainwater for various uses and others are setting up large arrays of solar panels. His idea is to put gutters on solar panels and pipe off the rain into storage areas.
He’s figured since water is scarce in Tucson, which only gets about 12 inches of rain a year, a square mile of solar panels could collect over 208 million gallons of water.
Pretty cool idea!
(Reported in OnEarth Summer 2010)