$ USD
General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
NIKOSIA – With abundant sunshine year round – 300-340 days – Cyprus is tapping the power of the sun to bring free hot water to homes by installing rooftop solar panels in sustainable energy instead of using fossil fuels.
In a review of how the island has tapped the sun, The Guardian correspondent Helena Smith reported how simple it is too – a two-hour installation puts the black panels on top of a building or home and moves on to the next.
“We do around four installations a day across Cyprus,” said Petros Mihali of the Thriamvos company doing the work on this day. “And each takes little more than two hours at most because, like the system itself, it’s all so easy.”
And just like that another household on the island has gone solar during a time when world governments have essentially made only window dressing measures to deal with climate change and solar power not being fully utilized.
But Cyprus has outpaced other European Union Member States in installing the solar hot-water systems, reaching 93.5 percent of households, and also helping reduce electricity bills as well.
EU figures show the eastern Mediterranean island exceeding renewable energy targets set in the heating and cooling of buildings thanks to the widespread use of solar thermal technology, the report said.
“There are many areas where Cyprus has not achieved greenhouse gas emission goals,”the island’s first Environment Commissioner Charalampos Theopemptou told the newspaper about the challenges.
“But in terms of renewable energy resources being used for the sustainable heating and cooling of buildings, we’ve met the target easily, precisely because of such extensive utilization of solar water heaters for so many years,” he added.
There were projects some 60 years earlier which he said even though not only collected solar energy as heat – usually generated through electricity and the burning of fossil fuels – but were cost effective and created an industry.
“It’s been great for low-income families and then there’s the jobs: so many have been generated,” he said. “There are the local manufacturers who produce the parts and then all the people who are trained to install them. It’s big business.”
Theopemptou pushed to make the solar systems obligatory on all newly constructed residential and commercial buildings, following the model set by Israel in the 1970s, far ahead of other countries.
“In my role as commissioner it was a priority,” he said. “Architects now have to make sure that rooftops not only have enough space for the installations but that they can also carry the weight.”
LOOK TO THE SKIES
The solar water heaters became so popular that a union of local solar thermal industrialists was established in 1977 and more than 962,564 square cubic meters (10,360,952 square feet) of “solar collectors” have been installed, the union said.
The use has spread to businesses and hotels, helping lower costs for the tourism sector that is the country’s revenue engine, and nearly all the hotels now use them, the report also added.
Cyprus hasn’t used the sun to fully enerate electricity, relying on dirty mazut fuel oil or diesel and buys emission quotas from other member states to meet legal objectives instead of being required to reduce emissions.
That also accounts for up to a third of the monthly cost of electricity bills, upsetting homeowners, with EU member countries slow to move toward solar panels on rooftops for electricity which would lower or eliminate costs for homeowners.
Demetra Asprou, a retired engineer, said with so much sun that Cyprus should look toward solar as the answer. “It reduces electricity costs, increases the efficiency with which hot water is provided and is kind to the environment.”
She added, “Why would anyone use other, more traditional means to heat up water when only a few hours of sunlight, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. is enough for a 200-liter (44-gallon) tank to be filled with warm water that will last 48 hours? On days when there is no sunlight, which is rare, you always have electricity as a backup if necessary.”
Now in her 70s, Asprou, who lives in a Finnish-style log house in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, a 30-minute drive from Nicosia, was a convert to the thermal system nearly 40 years ago, the report added.
“Installation costs may be three times higher today, but there are EU-funded grants that the government hands out and within a year it’s all paid off,” she said. “After that, you basically have free hot water and see your electricity bills greatly reduced. In a country like Cyprus, it’s a no-brainer.”
The drawback, said Theopemptou, is that they are ugly on top of roofs, although it wasn’t said why they couldn’t be shielded by fences for aesthetic purposes and still serve the function for which they are designed.
“If I have one regret it’s that we didn’t manage to introduce regulations to improve the aesthetics of the installations. That said, I still believe they should be mandated on all buildings across the region, given the great number of days we have sunshine in the Mediterranean,” he said.
