🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 24897@cs.rochester.edu, dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz) writes:
>In article <jfelder-080193105134@latvia.lerc.nasa.gov> jfelder@lerc.nasa.gov (James L. Felder) writes:
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>> No, to unreliable.  Terrestrial solar energy has a problem because of
>> intermittent illumination.  Either a large storage capacity must be
>> included in the system, or another source must come on-line at night and
>> during periods of cloud cover.  The large required land area makes solar
>> problematic for large portion of the world.  Plus places like Cleveland
>> goes days or weeks with hardly a glimpse of the sun.
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>Surely, means to move energy in both time and space would be needed.
>There are serious economic limits on this today, but there is no
>reason to think these limits cannot be extended.
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>As for land area: current world energy use is only 1/10,000 of the
>sunlight hitting earth's surface.  Restricting ourselves to
>continents, and assuming a 20% efficieny, we end up using a couple of
>percent of the land area of the planet.
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Of course, what is the ecological effect of covering 1% of the earth's
land mass?  Unless it is a distributed grid (i.e. everyong has their
own solar panel on their roof) I would assume that solar collection would
be located centrally.  This would require large tracks of land and would
effectively kill anything on the land.  Bright sunny areas like deserts would
be ideal for such facilities, of course these deserst also support ecologies that
depend very heavily on the sun.

Nuclear is a much better solution as long as the political ramifications are
handled effectively. I am not encouraged though.

>
>	Paul F. Dietz
>	dietz@cs.rochester.edu