Is solar power a good alternative?
- Thread starter civ_king
- Start date
As I understand the issue, solar power is becoming more efficient. I have my doubts that it is practical for large-scale projects like national power. I see nuclear power as more practical in that regard, especially given advances in our ability to reprocess waste.
How about in a lake?
Just some random lake doesn't work, it needs to be an elevated lake so that you have some height difference to work with. While such things do exist, there aren't many of them. And if you plug in the numbers for such lakes, you'll see, that theoretically you can store power for a few days. But you'd have to solve problems like how to completely drain and refill the Walchensee while generating power and you'd still need a solution for winter.
Nuclear power relies on a non-renewable resource.
Solar has by far the most potential of any energy technology. Wind and Nuclear power are important as well, but Solar is the dominant energy technology of the future.
So what? Solar power isn't strictly renewable either. (Not to mention, that it is also nuclear power...)
Irish Caesar
Yellow Jacket
Solar is certainly the distant future, but as non-renewable as nuclear is, there's a lot more near-future potential for that than fossils at least until we get to solar.
With solar we need lots of storage capability, super batteries, if you will. Until then, the technology is available for creating fissile material; people just need to stop thinking of that purpose as bomb-making and start thinking of it as medium-term sustainable fuel-making.
As far as I know, studies that show how much uranium we have left only include U235, and that selling ourselves ridiculously short.
Solar is getting more efficient? We've been working on it for how many decades and we still struggle with 15% efficiency with solarvoltaics. There's a ceiling on efficiencies, and we've reached it or come close with traditional solar power. The only hope with solar is to emulate photosynthesis to create a current to produce electricity. This is something MIT is currently working on and if it can really be done, perhaps 37% efficiency can be achieved.
For everyone that can visualize 100 miles of solar arrays, try and picture just one square mile in your local area covered in solar panels. It is hardly an easy solution that has been proposed.
If solar is going to be the answer then there are numerous that have to worked out first.
For everyone that can visualize 100 miles of solar arrays, try and picture just one square mile in your local area covered in solar panels. It is hardly an easy solution that has been proposed.
If solar is going to be the answer then there are numerous that have to worked out first.
Ayatollah So
the spoof'll set you free
Yeah. It's called hydrogen.
A great target, except for the minor detail that it's already been surpassed:
Concentrate!
Fugitive Sisyphus
Escape Artist
Wow. The article doesn't say how good the catalyst is but that could be huge. Right now we get hydrogen from methane but if we could get it efficiently from water, hydrogen fuel cells could become very practical.
Irish Caesar
Yellow Jacket
So, do we have a good way of storing and "burning" hydrogen yet? Electrolysis is simple, but what we really need is a way to use the hyrdogen. I'd love to have a solar house, but I'd either need the grid for nighttime/cloudy days or need a very expensive battery system. If I could get a cheap battery system it would look much more attractive.
