Sometimes sun times are summed times This one will be short. Again I didnt read it, but one problem inherent to this statement is how to map from area of land needed to amount of energy provided. Sunlight varies over time(not to mention weather). Energy usage varies over time… Chen Chen is the person to talk to about that not I. Power plants’ localities matter a lot because of energy loss in transport… Steven Li knows way more about this than I. We dont have battery technology to hold energy in large enough quantities with high enough fidelity to be able to weather the entire world’s time spent in night. However efficiency at collecting solar energy(based on reports from various science news podcasts I listen to incl. naked scientists, inquiring minds, originz, etc … ie, I include this caveat to demonstrate that I really really dont have the background to comprehend the tech) is improving. If I remember correctly from using different light resonating particles to capture more of the spectrum of light that hits the panels. > An aside, I think I remember hearing something about the actual color of the sun’s light (in terms of spectral energy distribution) varying by locale & by time of year(clearly it varies over the day, see sunrise, sunset). Not to mention that “to power the world” is unhelpfully ambiguous… how does it scale to account for the growth of BRINC nations? Does it do a simple linear trend extrapolation, in which case, is that a reasonable assumption giving the expected growth of the nations? And what about changing standards of living globally? Basically what Im trying to say is that the title is at best meaningless in terms of actual future technological capabilities but useful for demonstrating the importance of using energy sources that we do not expect to run out anytime in the near future. But at worst it will be misleading. There is no clean mapping between room and needed power because neither is a well defined quantity with respect only to the other. So many subtleties are likely to be swept under the rug. Ok it wasnt short. Oops. This also wasnt one of my best arguments. Oh well. Cheers, :€
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:12:45 +0000