(July 15, 2015 at 3:48 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:(July 10, 2015 at 4:36 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Fortunately, there's already a solution to hand - solar. I mean, the sun is everywhere. The cost of building and maintaining solar power systems is dropping like a paralyzed falcon, storage systems are improving and conservative estimates are expecting solar power to provide some 30% of the world's electricity needs by 2050 (I think that's what I read).Sorry I forgot to address this. You can't be serious? While solar is good help, it is not suitable as a primary central-station power source. Fifty years from now, only coal, fission, and fusion are capable of supplying the dependable, steady backbone power that the civilized world can count on.
Plus, if your solar panel breaks, you can clear it up with a broom - no HazMat suit required.
Boru
1GW of electricity needs 50 square miles or to completely supplement all today's energy needs you would need area of United States all covered with solar panels.
The atmosphere absorbs part of the sunlight. The sun does not shine at night and does not rise high in the winter. There are cloudy and stormy days. There is little sunlight at high latitudes, where the power is most needed. Solar cells can capture only part of the solar spectrum and are not efficient at that. The peak efficiencies quoted apply only when the sun is directly overhead. The color of sunlight changes near sunset and no longer matches the color the solar cells are optimized for. Solar panels cannot economically be turned to follow the sun as it moves across the sky. We are lucky to capture a few percent of solar energy, but even that is a lot of energy that should not be wasted.
But sure there are solutions even today like Earthship - a house you can live in that you don't have to slave to pay the heating bills, cooling, electricity and even food is free if you are a vegetarian.
-Actually, you can generate 1GW from about 3.2 acres of PV or CSP facility. Since you're off by a factor of 10 000, you'd only need to cover 1/10000th of the US with solar panels. Pick a few states you don't need, and go to it.
-Yes, the atmosphere absorbs sunlight, but no one's claiming that we need to capture 100% of the sunlight to make this work.
-The sun shines all the time, just not everywhere at once and not with the same intensity. What of it? The heat generated from solar power is storable.
-As for the power being most needed at higher latitudes, - you're aware that electricity is a transportable commodity, correct?
-Solar panels only need to capture part of the spectrum, and they're efficient enough for their purpose.
-Erm...the sun is always directly overhead, and yes, you can indeed track panels to follow the sun's path. A lot of solar plants do exactly that.
But the best argument for solar over fusion is that we already know how to do it. What you're suggesting boils down to investing billions in money and years of research (how many years? 5, 20, 30? - fusion power always seems to be '30 years away) in a technology that may or may not pan out.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax