Watch Modern Marvels occasionally. For instance, the Mackinac Bridge cost about $100 million dollars when it was built around 1957. It was such a gamble that the State of Michigan wouldn’t guarantee the bonds. They ended up being sold privately. It was a Modern Marvel. If you tried to build it today it would cost billions. The economic payoff has been incalculable aside from the fact that the bonds got paid off in full.
Sometimes you have to have enough foresight to make an investment in the future. Solar power is clean and available. I skirts a lot of political issues. Why not pursue it?
Because sometimes the technology just isn’t ready to deploy…and sometimes it never will be. A similar question might be…why not build a space elevator today, or a fusion plant? The pay off (if we could do it) would be immense. So, why not just start doing it and rely on the technology to simply catch up to meet our needs?
Or, perhaps a better example…why not just switch over to battery powered vehicles? Why not just build them now? The technology certainly exists after all…so, why not just do it? The answer of course is that though the technology certainly exists it’s too expensive today…and the manufacturing simply isn’t there to produce what would be needed on the scales we are talking about. The article I put in the OP gives a rough idea of the kinds of money we are talking about…$450 billion a year for 20+ years to get solar deployed on a sufficient scale as to make it a major player. Sure, the pay off would be huge if you could do it…and I’m sure the technology and manufacturing would also be there if you devoted that kind of capital to the project. However, politically, there is no way we are going to invest that kind of money over that kind of time frame in order to do it.
I don’t think you’re reading that correctly. It’s not $450B per year, it’s $450B total (or $400B, depending on the sentence). From the OP:
$400B to $450B total over 40 years, not $450B/year for 40 years.
And, ramping up industrial capacity is easy. We did it in WW2, we saw the computer industry do it in less than 10 years, cell phones, all kinds of things. If the demand is there, the money is there. And once people see both of those things waiting, production can and will quickly scale up to meet demand.
I must be reading it wrong then…I thought it was saying $400+ billion a year. If they are saying $400+ billion spread out over 39 years then I don’t see the problem…that’s only a bit more than $10 billion a year. Of course, if we are talking about 39 years then I’m not sure what the impact would be on the whole global warming thingy in that case.
What about all that UNTAPPED solar power stored as GEOTHERMAL heat in our oceans. Does anyone remember The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in 8 easy Steps it talks about simple Geothermal Ocean Generator (OTECS) that could be used to power LOTS of things including the “Gravity Rail” needed to launch the Solar Power generators into orbit. At significantly Reduced costs
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, here… Geothermal heat is neither solar nor in the oceans. And heat energy is only usable if there’s some reservoir available of material at a different temperature… What are you proposing to use as the cold reservoir to get useful energy out of ocean heat?
I don’t think you’re remembering quite right. Let’s take the 3 years break-even point. If that’s true, any year we expand our solar capacity by > 33%, we consume more energy (*) than solar produced that year. If we expand by < 33%, solar is a net producer. Of course, we should have some allowance for solar panel production that replaces worn-out panels instead of increasing productivity, so we’ll adjust that number downward a bit to 30%.
So how much solar power would we have after 30 years of expanding at that break-even rate? It would be C * 1.3 ^ 30, where C is current production. So that comes to 2620*C. 2620 times our current rate of production! I’ve heard bandied around here that current solar production is about 0.1% of current electricity production. I think it’s a little higher, but let’s use the lower number. In 30 years, we’ll have 2.62 times more than 2009’s total electricity production from solar alone. Of course, in 2039, we’re likely to be using more electricity, but even if you assume 3% growth, it’s still only 2.42 times more. So we’d be producing more than 100% of our electricity from solar. In 30 years!
Does this sound realistic? Probably not, so what’s more likely is that the growth rate of solar will slow down at some point before 30 years in the futures, fall below 30%, and at that point we’ll have net positive electricity production from solar.
(*) I’ll go ahead and assume that all of the energy used in solar panel production is electricity.
I believe he’s talking about ocean thermal power, which exploits the temperature difference between the surface layer and the deep ocean. The problem is making it cost-effective. The ocean is a very difficult environment for engineering, and that drives up costs.
There is no shortage of mechanisms to extract energy from various natural processes. Wave power, geothermal, solar, wind… I’ve seen proposals that extract power from static tension on huge kite lines. Others that use snake-like floating tubes that twist around in the surf and generate power. It all can be done - in theory. But the devil is always in the details. Once you get away from highly concentrated sources of energy, the feasibility of extracting useful power in an economic way gets more and more unlikely.
Yes, I think you are correct. I now think it is obvious that if solar cell only happened tomorrow, then three years from tomorrow you’d break even and from that point on there is net contribution. Beats me what I was thinking.
Now, it could still take a long time to have a net contribution of so many percent of the total - I wonder if that was the point of what I read?
And actual return on energy invested may be earlier than that. This UN Chronicle report states that
Moreover, that article goes on, Concentrating Solar (CSP) may be much better yet.
(Although I doubt those figures included the energy costs of improving the transmission infrastructure, which would also be required to make that work.)
Yes I was talking about OTECs and I do believe it is “Solar” the same way that earlier it was talked about using Solar power to “STORE” energy as compressed air in caverns and then get that energy back later. The Energy “stored” in the ocean due to the difference in temperature caused by the sun HEATING the upper layer but that heat not reaching lower layers is to all practical purposes LIMITLESS
This energy is a lot cheaper to get than many think
OTEC tubes can be very cheaply built (Practically GROWN FREE) and the generators are already in existance.