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I suggest we continue to burn coal and petroleum and use the energy to develop an energy technology based on nuclear fission and fuel breeding. There are huge amounts of Thorium on the surface of the earth that could be "bred" into fissile nuclear fuel to power a world wide civilization at the first world economic levels.
I believe this technology is being suppressed by the international fossil fuel industry to protect their monopoly on energy and their current and future profits. That makes good sense to them at the expense of an uncertain future for the rest of us.
Thorium cycle fission is commercially available. It's not being suppressed, it isn't as cost competitive as U235 which is still burning up a lot of fuel from the former Soviet Union. There was a thorium cycle core installed at the Shippingport plant in the 70s that prved all the technical issues.
Zot it's really irrelevant because the amount of BTU's delivered to earth's surface trumps everything by many magnitudes. Even if we were to derive all our energy needs from solar and all that heat were to magically disappear after being converted to electric it's still just an infinitesimally small fraction of the total BTU's delivered to the earth's surface.
Solar panels don't convert heat to electricity, at least not the kind of panels that most people think of when talking about solar power.
The absence of sunlight reaching the earth for the amount of area required to get most of the electricity needs fulfilled from solar panels would affect local environments though. Already, environmentalists are at odds with "greeners" about large solar panel farms and their impact upon the environment. Strange since both groups claim to be concerned about the planet's environment and ecosystem.
In the areas where large amounts of panels are placed, the areas under them become inhospitable to whatever was there before. The arguments that there wasn't anything there before only puts on the display the ignorance of those claiming it.
Sort of reminds me about positions put forth when a stream is diverted and those diverting it say something like "see? Look at all the wild life that is growing close to the stream where it wasn't before, that has to be a good thing".
Ah, no, the point is that it wasn't there before and shouldn't be now either. In the case where solar panel farms are selected to be cited, those areas are far more delicate than many other locations and very little outward appearing impacts can and do have an exponentially greater effect on the local environment.
Put a solar panel out in the back yard and have it track the sun (as do many panels at solar farms) and see what grows underneath it. Very little. Dig down and compare the earth beneath the panel to that of the earth just a short distance away. One will be pretty barren the other much different. Guess which one is barren?
[quote=Mack Knife;34586315]Solar panels don't convert heat to electricity, at least not the kind of panels that most people think of when talking about solar power.[/quite]
It isn't very intuitive, but a a simplified explanation of what happens, both in nature and in solar panels, is that energy in the form of both visible and invisible light comes in from the sun, is absorbed to a certain degree by what it falls on, reflects the rest, and then what it absorbs is converted to lower frequency energy, which eventually radiates out in all directions into space as infrared and lower frequencies. In other words, in the simplest explanation, light hitting the earth is radiated back out to space as heat, but in the transformation from one frequency to another we can do work with the energy.
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The absence of sunlight reaching the earth for the amount of area required to get most of the electricity needs fulfilled from solar panels would affect local environments though. Already, environmentalists are at odds with "greeners" about large solar panel farms and their impact upon the environment. Strange since both groups claim to be concerned about the planet's environment and ecosystem.
The entire present energy needs of all of mankind is equal to only about 1.5% of the sunlight that falls on the Earth every day. But currently we only generate about 1% of what we consume using solar energy, so we've really got a long, long way to go before we have any noticeable impact from using solar energy.
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In the areas where large amounts of panels are placed, the areas under them become inhospitable to whatever was there before. The arguments that there wasn't anything there before only puts on the display the ignorance of those claiming it.
I've heard the reverse, that solar panels in the desert provide shade to the critters that live there, providing an unexpected benefit to the local ecology. They certainly do better than if the desert was ripped and rolled and turned into suburban housing tracts. Most of the ground is intact, and able to harbor life.
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Put a solar panel out in the back yard and have it track the sun (as do many panels at solar farms) and see what grows underneath it. Very little. Dig down and compare the earth beneath the panel to that of the earth just a short distance away. One will be pretty barren the other much different. Guess which one is barren?
I have no idea why you're going into this fable from the Chicken Little series when it has so little to do with anything real. Anybody who has ever spent time in the desert knows that a LOT of sunlight bounces around in the desert. Personally I can stay in the shade all day and still get a sunburn from all the light bouncing around. Likewise life in any particular patch of dirt under a solar panel or reflector goes on, pretty much as if it were in the shade of a big rock or something.
Zot it's really irrelevant because the amount of BTU's delivered to earth's surface trumps everything by many magnitudes. Even if we were to derive all our energy needs from solar and all that heat were to magically disappear after being converted to electric it's still just an infinitesimally small fraction of the total BTU's delivered to the earth's surface.
Correct, but it isn't a "somehow" and it isn't magic, it's just the normal operation of physical laws.
Whether the sunlight falls on a rock and heats it up so that it radiates the energy out to space when the sun goes down and the air cools down, or it falls on a solar photovoltaic panel, where the light is converted to electricity which is distributed to an electric motor which turns a fan and all the heat energy from the panel and the wire and the motor go into the air and then are radiated out to space, it all balances out over time.
Or let's look at sunlight that falls on water, causing it to evaporate into vapor, which rises in the air, until a combination of factors causes the water vapor to coalesce into droplets and fall as rain, releasing heat, which then... you guessed it... radiates into space.
What IS pretty magical about the earth is that all the energy from the sun + all the energy given off from the earth's core normally is in balance with the energy radiating out into space. That natural equilibrium serves as a thermostat, keeping the average temperature of earth fairly constant. But it can be thrown off balance by gross changes in the atmospheric makeup. Back in 1883, the gigantic volcanic explosion at Krakatoa Indonesia threw such enormous amounts of ash particles into the upper atmosphere that it cooled the atmosphere for about 3 years, by reflecting sunlight back into space instead of reaching the surface. More recently the balance has been thrown off by the steadily increasing amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, so called because they let the light in but trap the heat from going out, the way greenhouse windows do.
Using solar energy won't heat up the planet, but it might help reset the CO2 balance if we can get enough of it deployed in time. That's the essence of what using renewable energy to replace fossil fuels is all about.
Solar panels belong on the roof. Out in the deserts where the solar tends to be solar thermal, many animals like the shade of ground mounted solar panels. A comparable situation exists at many thermal electric plants that cool with water. Fish tend to congregate at the discharge.
Given yesterday's SCOTUS ruling regarding coal burning power plants some here may want to revise their posts. *LOL*
It is clear that before Obama leaves office the EPA will have done everything in it's power to get shot of coal, at least for power plants. With the aforementioned SC ruling at their backs the McCarthy woman now has free reign. It won't matter speaking of what will happen after 2016 because once coal is phased out costs of restarting and bringing back the supporting infrastructure may make it not worth the bother.
Given yesterday's SCOTUS ruling regarding coal burning power plants some here may want to revise their posts. *LOL*
It is clear that before Obama leaves office the EPA will have done everything in it's power to get shot of coal, at least for power plants. With the aforementioned SC ruling at their backs the McCarthy woman now has free reign. It won't matter speaking of what will happen after 2016 because once coal is phased out costs of restarting and bringing back the supporting infrastructure may make it not worth the bother.
Some analysts disagree with your assessment of the impact the SCOTUS decision will have; plans were ready in case the decision came out as it did.
There are a lot of elections to go before coal is replaced by some other means of generating power. That doesn't mean that alternatives won't move forward and even get a boost from this but years from now, coal will still be around.
States that get their power from states producing power from coal fired plants aren't going to be running to the courts or the EPA.
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