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Could this be a solution in the EU's problem of bringing jobs and wealth to North Africa? Thereby encouraging immigrants to stay in their homeland? The Sahara has some of the Sunniest sky's in the world. Maybe its time to spend a few hundred billion and build those solar plants in North Africa.
Could this be a solution in the EU's problem of bringing jobs and wealth to North Africa? Thereby encouraging immigrants to stay in their homeland? The Sahara has some of the Sunniest sky's in the world. Maybe its time to spend a few hundred billion and build those solar plants in North Africa.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, he's being a scientist, and adjusting his conclusions to suit the available evidence. Which, to people not familiar with the scientific method, is shocking.
Yes, but only to a certain extent, I think. A truly honest, and most importantly, useful analysis wouldn't be limited to admitting that previous research did result in wrong predictions. I'd like to see a breakdown of what was wrong in the previous prediction, and to be sure that it's understood well, I would like to see also a true prediction based on modelling and not limited to .. observing what is happening with…
Most industries, most of the time, show exponential improvement over time on whatever their primary measure of quality is. Moore's law is the most famous simply because its speed has had such dramatic effects, normally improvement is smaller, for example the 7% increase/year in battery capacity for a fixed price that Tesla's future business plans rely on.
See this graph of the cost of memory storage in hard drives: http://www.jcmit.com/disk2015.htm. (Note that an exponential curve is approximately a straight line on a log graph.)
Every so often there will be breakthroughs which show up as sudden jumps. After the breakthrough is assimilated you'll often see a pause because research plans were disrupted by the breakthrough, and then the curves start going again. Sometimes at a different speed. As an example on the above graph, the sudden order of magnitude price drop between 1995 and 2000 is due to the commercialization of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR).
This pattern of technological advance is well-known, but the jumps are not predictable in advance. However even after such a jump, your best bet for projecting continued improvement over years to decades is the same methodology.
Given that Solar power is the fundamental source of energy leading to petroleum based energy (starting with photosynthesis), it's surprising that we still rely on petroleum to the degree we do today. In 100 years this would perhaps be something people would find shocking (like how we are shocked today at how mainstream slavery used to be 150 odd years ago). Solar Energy is unlimited, cheap and clean. My guess would b…
At the radius from the sun that our planet is, there is an upper limit to solar energy of about 4/3 Watts/(M^2) (projected across the curve of the earth during daylight... through atmosphere...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
The most effective way of collecting sunlight is to use curved reflective surfaces and concentrate it on to points that generate useful work either from the heat or from the photon intensity.
Interestingly, such mirrors also offer anime/bond villain/scifi style focused energy delivery 'weapons'; which is why I am most surprised that the US space programs haven't put any in to higher orbit above the majority of the garbage floating about the earth.
It might also be possible to use the delivered energy from such a system to incite deceleration of existing orbital junk and force burn-up/re-entry.
"Admits" seems a bit harsh, like he was doing his best to hide something from the world. By all accounts, it looks like he had written out a reasonable explanation as to why he predicted solar would not become cost effective. At the end of the day, if something doesn't make financial sense, it won't last long without subsidies from the government. The assumptions behind his predictions changed and therefore so did th…
Everyone seems to be projecting their own egos onto this guy. Their minds say, "If I were proved wrong and had to admit it, I'd be mortified." These people aren't scientists. They're being emotional.
Again, props to this guy.
Given that Solar power is the fundamental source of energy leading to petroleum based energy (starting with photosynthesis), it's surprising that we still rely on petroleum to the degree we do today. In 100 years this would perhaps be something people would find shocking (like how we are shocked today at how mainstream slavery used to be 150 odd years ago). Solar Energy is unlimited, cheap and clean. My guess would b…
Because history made us build structures and lifestyles that require oil class energy density. We surely don't need it since we were born without. We don't need all of this. Not to that extent, we could cut worldwide transportation. We could eat less. Rethink housing. Even internet[1]. I'd like to see the time when energy will lack. Sometimes I wonder how we could rebootstrap technology in a frugal manner. Have shelt…
(Ignoring that servers being busier without a good caching infrastructure tends to ramp up resource usage and pull more power)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because history made us build structures and lifestyles that require oil class energy density. We surely don't need it since we were born without. We don't need all of this. Not to that extent, we could cut worldwide transportation. We could eat less. Rethink housing. Even internet[1]. I'd like to see the time when energy will lack. Sometimes I wonder how we could rebootstrap technology in a frugal manner. Have shelt…
Don't feel bad. You did not waste any measurable amount of electricity. We constantly waste electricity by not utilizing the networks we have built to their full capacity. (Ignoring that servers being busier without a good caching infrastructure tends to ramp up resource usage and pull more power)
Please see: https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.files.wordpress.com...
And: http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/201...
And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqhC6uI8TUY (for french speakers out there)
Please do convince me that we can run the current industrial civilization, at current rates of energy usage, with only solar & wind, on a long enough run, without oil.
Could this be a solution in the EU's problem of bringing jobs and wealth to North Africa? Thereby encouraging immigrants to stay in their homeland? The Sahara has some of the Sunniest sky's in the world. Maybe its time to spend a few hundred billion and build those solar plants in North Africa.
I wish there was more analysis around energy storage (mainly because that's what my startup does). I think it's often overlooked in the press when talking about the future of solar. We're working to flatten the duck curve that solar created.