The population of Australia is around 20 million, which is about sixtieth of the Chinese total population--1.3 billion. Australia has very broad land area, low population density. However, Australia is rich in mineral resources, and it is a global mineral resources exporting country. Here we need to re-think about this: As Australia is so rich in mineral resources, why solar street light can be promoted in Australia, is there any advantage for solar street light?
Solar street light near the seashore of Western Australia
As we all know, Australia is locating in the countries of the southern hemisphere below the equator, where the solar energy resource is very rich, so the Australian people pay more attention to it and try to make the most of this resource. Here's an obvious example, a University of Western Australia, where coal resource is abundant. For choosing the use of coal to the supply electricity, the cost will be low, and the voltage is stable, also the school would not be affected by the weather power. In a word, the power supply from coal has a great advantage in sufficiency compared with the solar street lighting. Even though the use of coal to generate electricity has more advantage than solar energy, the school decides to choose solar power. On the other hand, this choice brings the school higher cost for initial investment, but meantime the solar energy brings a very good reputation to this school. People say this school is energy-saving and environmental-friendly, using non-polluting green energy.
Solar energy application has a huge market in Australia, since not only Australia has rich sunshine resource, but alsothere are manyAustraliansin particularly realizethe importance ofgreenresources. In spite of the fact that thecoal generating way can reduce the cost, they would preferthesolar energy resource---the high cost one since they consider the high consumption of coal.
