Last Saturday, a group of us from the Big Solar Wentworth group went to the Bondi Beach Farmers Markets to poll local residents. Having also polled in Bondi Junction Mall where everyone is too busy to stop and half of those that do are from out of area, polling at the markets has been a real boon.
We get to speak with so many different types of respondents who are mostly within the Wentworth electorate and there are often more people interested in finding out what we are doing than there are people to poll them. I never have more than 30 seconds between polling so the time really flies.
One family asked me to come and speak about solar thermal power stations at their school Rose Bay Secondary. Another woman took some of the flyers with the bigsolar.me website address to hand out at the Vaucluse Village.
It's strange but each week we poll we get different types of people in waves. Of the forty people I polled two worked directly and one indirectly with the nuclear mining industry and three engineers within the gas industry. Hearing what they had to say was interesting as they were all inspired by what solar thermal can do and agreed we should be building them in Australia with government assistance. A couple of them even had the look of "am I in the wrong industry, is this what I ought to be getting into" with one of them saying as much.
For the first time I had several respondents say that the big solar program ought definitely not be government funded, even though they thought we should build them.
When asking for a comment on what people would say to Malcolm Turnbull about solar thermal, this week I had a much higher percentage who knew about Malcolm's stance on Solar Thermal power. To his credit, Malcolm understands that Solar Thermal is something of a holy grail for renewable energy, as it provides base load power and is a proven technology that we ought to be investing in and not wasting money on Carbon Capture and Storage. (Check his speech at BZE launch in August 2010)
It has been such a pleasure doing the polling, because so many people get inspired when they hear about solar thermal and they give off that 'energy of excitement' when you've found out something new and sense the possibilities. Most want to know why we are not building it already with only a small percentage worried about the cost.
Another first for me was the amount of children this week that were inspired by big solar. Many said they would share the bigsolar.me site to help it go viral.
This week we welcomed a new pollster to our group & he got such a buzz from the experience he will be polling on our big solar doorknock in Paddington next Saturday and is keen to do future polling as well.
Regards Ian Rose
