On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 3:55 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote:
>> even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely >> take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute >> and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications. >> > > So say you... and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that > between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed > And it wouldn't be 1% that big without tax breaks and solar had to compete against other energy sources on merit alone. > You harp on dilute... well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you > need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well > Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. > So what if solar is dilute > So it takes a great deal of land to produce anything worthwhile, so environmentalists will start screaming bloody murder that it's harming some desert lizard few have ever heard of. > The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a > true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will > and are in fact evolving. > That is one hell of a lot of hand waving! Imagine how big and how expensive a battery would have to be to power your big screen living room TV for 36 days, or your iPhone for 20 years; well one gallon of gasoline has enough energy to do that and it only costs about $4. Can you find a $4 battery that can do that? Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. I'm not saying batteries can't get better and cheaper someday, but making them will be a much bigger challenge than putting a thorium reactor online. > Solar PV - IMO - is poised for a new wave of next generation > multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar > flux at many more wave-lengths > How well do they work at night? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
