I’m an immigrant – to Australia.  Although I’ve lived in the ‘land of the cloudless skies’ for over 20 years, people still ask me if penguins can live comfortably in Australia.  The answer is Yes, many of us do.  I believe our biggest colony is on Phillip Island near Melbourne but plenty of us live in Sydney too, near the harbour for the views, and well OK, and the fish restaurants.  

 Travelling Guins get around –allaround the world.  Did you know there are colonies of sun-loving penguins on the Galapagos Islands?  I didn’t until I visited these fantastic islands a little while ago.  I actually saw some of the Galapagos guins sunbathing on the coastal lava. In fact watching these guins was a lot warmer than watching the fairy guins come ashore at Philip Island here in Australia.

Speaking of being warm enough, one thing that puzzles me about living in Australia is why Aussies don’t exploit the free solar energy that makes almost every day so sparkly here. There’s a lot of desert in Australia – I wonder if it could be used to collect solar energy?  I hear that the sun bakes the Earth's surface with 86,000 trillion watts (terawatts), of energy at all times.  This is about 6500 times more than everyone on Earth uses every year.  So why not just set aside a bit of the Aussie outback and cover it with solar cells.  Maybe a few guins would move in there too.

When I go abroad I often see loads of solar collectors onroofs of houses and other buildings but not so many in Australia. Last year inthe national budget the old government doubled the rebate (up to a maximum ofA$8,000) that helped get more solar panels onto roofs. For our house I worked out it would take over 20 years to get back our investment just through the use of less electricity- although I didn’t factor in rising power prices – so probably less time.  We were ready to do it anyhow as part of our smaller carbon flipper-print until - this week -the new government put a means test on the rebate (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/05/16/2247035.htm).  Households with an annualincome over A$100.000 can no longer claim the rebate.  We just cancelled our order and, I wonder how many others did too?  In homes that have less than A$100,000 per year is there spare cash for the rather expensive solar panels