Solar Power

As you already should know, there's a lot of cool stuff going on around the Centre. Did you know that you can easily pop popcorn with help from just a mirror and the sun?

I didn't, but today I was trying out what our Greenpeace guys are teaching our guests every day – Solar Power Experience.  It was pretty amazing. 

The earth fits 1.3 million times in the sun if you compare the sizes. It's huge! 

It's actually more than enough of energy to get from the sun to meet all of our energy needs. Isn't that cool?

So we started up with a description of the suns size compared to the earth. Can you see the little needle compared to the big ball? But the distance is not true in this picture..

We tried to heat a stove with only the help of some mirrors pointed in the suns directions. It warmed up really quickly. 

They also had a quiz with really good questions that you learned a lot from. A European uses fourteen times much energy than a person living in India, and an American twice as much as a European..  

And what makes an activity better than popcorn? Just a few seconds and the popcorn was all over the place. The heat goes up to 200 degrees in there.

Then we were using magnifiers to burn into wood, I was so amazed about this, it was so easy and fast. 

As you can tell from my words, there's a lot of amazing things you can try with just power from the sun. And if you want to make the world a better place, you should start using solar power instead of anything else, because as you can tell we have loads of it. And KISC loves to be ECO friendly as you know!

  

Kristina Bogren (SE)

STS Summer 2012