“Why is it, that doing something, is so much harder than thinking about doing something?

This fascinating existential question confronted me recently while I was thinking about my mother’s solar panels.

She lives in a suburb where roofs outnumber trees 10:0.  A perfect place to harness the power of the sun. I’d been telling her for a while now that it would be good for both the environment and her hip pocket to install solar panels. Together we’d sit at her kitchen table, eating her delicious Olive Oil, Fennel and Chilli Biscuits, and drinking a glass of her home made wine, as I pointed out that she’d be able to run her air conditioner all day and save money on her electricity bill at the same time. To myself I’d think, “Why doesn’t she just get them?” To her, I’d say, “Why don’t you just get them?” But I’d return on my next visit, and the one after that, and still her roof remained bare of photo-voltaic membranes.

Then one day, during one of these conversations, trying to be extra helpful, I said, “Why don’t you ask someone who’s already got panels on their roof to tell you how they did it?” Frankly I didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this herself. Well it turns out she had. She told me all about feed in tariffs; and that you have to use all your appliances in the day time, because that’s when you’re using the electricity you generate, but at night, you’re using electricity from the grid, so you pay for it.

“So if you only use electricity in the day time, you’ll never pay an electricity bill again?” I asked.  Although it didn’t make any sense to me, I was quite excited by the idea.

But she explained that it was a little more complicated than that. You could also get a battery she told me. And then you could store your electricity and use it at night.

“Wow,” I said.

But batteries are very expensive she said, so that was out.

Although my mother now had a lot of information, she still hadn’t done anything about getting solar panels. Just as I was wondering why, if she really wanted them, she didn’t just get them, she handed me a leaflet. It was one of those ads that gets shoved into your letterbox, the type that most people are too busy to look at, so put straight into the recycling bin.  But my mother, being retired, had not only kept it, but also carefully examined it, and now she wanted me to do the same. It was an ad for solar panels offering a 50% discount on products and installation if you called the number NOW!

And suddenly I had one of those rare flashes of insight. My mother was actually asking me to install solar panels on her roof. Well, not expecting me to actually get up there and do it myself, but to organise it. I realised that she’d been trying to politely ask me to do this for weeks. And I’d thought we were just sitting around eating biscuits and drinking wine.

“Just ring them and get a quote,” my mother said. Was that a little frustration I detected in her tone? Was she, an Italian migrant for whom English is a second language, wondering why a tertiary educated first language speaker couldn’t make a phone call?

So because I’d disappointed her in so many ways so far in my life, by not getting married, by not giving her grandchildren, to name just two, I decided that this time I would come through for her. I would give her solar panels. Well, she’d still have to pay for them. I’d just organise it for her. There and then I appointed myself her solar panel project manager.

And so I rang the number on the brochure and I wasn’t wrong in naming this a project. Forty five minutes later, I’d inspected the electricity board, taken photos of the roof, checked out my mothers house on satellite maps, got out the compass to work out which way was north, and trawled through her last year’s worth of electricity bills, all so that the sales person on the other end of the phone could generate a quote.

But it felt great to take action.  And so I got straight onto the internet and found two more companies that installed solar panels and rang them for quotes too. They were stunned that I already knew that my mother has single phase electricity and an average pitch to her north facing roof. It didn’t seem to tweak with them that perhaps I’d done this all before.

After three phone calls I was exhausted. Just getting quotes for solar panels had taken all afternoon. This could takeover my whole life! I might never be able to lie on the couch, and just imagine things, again.

But just two years down the track, I’m standing in my mother’s front yard admiring the solar panels on her roof. She’s disappeared inside so I follow her in. I raid her biscuit tin as a reward for doing our bit in the battle against climate change.  Then I lie on the couch in her front room, with the air con blasting, sipping a glass of her home made wine and imagining a world where we achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, one roof at a time.  That’s when my mother comes in with a leaflet which she hands to me. It’s an ad for installing a solar battery. It offers a 50% discount if you call the number NOW!

“Just ring them and get a quote,” she says. “It is not so hard.”

Images: 1)  An aerial view of housing developments near Markham, Ontario, photo by I Duke – Wikimedia Commons;  2) & 3) Writer’s own;  4) Wayne National Forest Solar Panel Construction – Wikimedia Commons;