Will the BP Oil Disaster Stimulate Growth in Solar Installations?

I was at a friend’s house yesterday afternoon doing a solar site evaluation and I had a really interesting conversation about the BP oil catastrophe.  She mentioned something that sounded funny to me at first.  She said that the oil  spill must be having a positive impact on the solar industry.  The incident made me think about why offshore drilling was misguided, but I never thought about how it was turning people off from oil. My friend was one of those people.

She and her family had accrued some savings, and now they wanted to use that money toward home improvements that would decrease their annual expenses.  These improvements included replacing their oil line with a gas line and evaluating if solar could be an option to offset their electricity needs. She had contacted a contractor a couple of months ago who would connect the gas line and install a new boiler.  The contractor had never gotten back to her with a quote so in the last week, she had contacted several other contractors.  All responded that they couldn’t take on her project because their schedule was already full.  It’s odd that these businesses would turn down work.  My friend inferred this must somehow be related to what’s going on with BP in the gulf.  She said that all the negative press must also be pushing people away from oil toward domestic (natural gas) and/or renewable sources of energy. I hope she’s right.

I’m not sure what other type of un-natural disaster it’s going to take to open more eyes. CNN just reported that this is the worst oil spill in US history, even surpassing the oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez.  Government scientists believe that the 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil could be leaking each day and we are more than 30 days into the spill.

Offshore drilling will not solve the addiction to fossil fuels, it will perpetuate the need for oil. Haven’t we already heard the expression oil and water don’t mix?  It just doesn’t seem right to be drilling for oil in the ocean.  From what we have already seen off the coast of Louisiana, there’s too much risk if something goes wrong. The oil companies thought they had managed the risks of drilling so well that a quick response blowout plan was not needed.  So if these companies don’t clearly understand the risks associated with their efforts, does it really make sense to be drilling for oil in the ocean?  If we invested the billions of dollars that went to offshore drilling into renewable energy, then that investment could have significantly decreased our need for oil.  It’s just not logical to take this kind of environmental risk to achieve a small benefit in energy production when the same investment could have had a much more significant benefit on energy production AND help the environment.