As we all know there are two ways of looking at most subjects, and so it is with solar panels. “It’s great to see how well people here have embraced alternative energy,” a participant in our recent Open Houses event said to me, gesturing at the storage tanks that festoon almost every local roof. On the other hand: “I never go to Göreme,” an hotelier from Ürgüp said sniffily. “All those awful solar panels.”
On this topic I find myself impaled on the horns of an unlikely dilemma. On the one hand, I’m all for cutting back on greenhouse gases, recycling and all those other planet-saving initiatives. On the other hand I love the visual environment inordinately and my heart aches whenever I see another piece of power-generating paraphernalia disfiguring the roof of a lovely old stone house.
There’s no arguing with the logic of the panels, whether on environmental or economic grounds. A single unit provides my neighbor with enough free hot water to see her through the summer, and sometimes I think myself a complete fool for refusing to get one. But, oh, is the visual environment paying a high price for all that “free” electricity.
The view from the Kelebek Pension is one of the loveliest in Cappadocia, and over the years I have spent many happy hours enjoying it. Then one afternoon I looked out from the terrace and there, right in the middle of the vista, saw a hideous solar-power storage unit sticking straight up into the sky as if giving the finger to the landscape. No longer would anyone be able to take a picture of the view without that ugly tank slicing through the middle of it. Fortunately it had been placed there on behalf of an expat home-owner who spends relatively little time in Göreme, and who was easily persuaded to reinstall it somewhere less conspicuous.
But we were only buying a breathing space. Shortly afterwards I looked across at my own home -- and saw that my immediate neighbor had trailed a set of hideous pipes leading to a solar panel all the way down the front of his house.
What is the answer? There is no way people will be persuaded to take the panels down again, and no doubt the greenhouse-gases argument trumps everything else anyway. However, there are some ways in which those panels could be made a bit less visually damaging. They could, for example, be set up horizontally rather than vertically. They could be painted in colors that blend with, rather than confronting, their surroundings. They could be concealed behind parapets.
As for the little cap on the warning light, no one could be curmudgeonly enough to object to that, now could they?
Pat Yale lives in a converted cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
