Me: Whether that’s true or not depends on all the materials, manpower, and machines.
Ashwin: The entire process of harnessing the sun’s power. (Completing my sentence)
The basic problem is that because sunlight and wind are dilute (low-concentration) and unreliable energy inputs.
Me: It takes a lot of resources to collect and concentrate them, and even more resources to make them available on-demand. These are called the dilutes problem and the intermittency problem.
Ashwin: The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful, reliable sources of energy would be to combine them with some form of extremely inexpensive mass-storage system.
Me: But, no such mass-storage system exists??? Because storing energy in a compact space it takes a lot of resources. Which is why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them require backup—except that “backup” implies that solar and wind work most of the time. It’s more accurate to say that solar and wind are parasites that require a host.
Ashwin: We should definitely learn from Germany.
Shrinidhi: What happens in winters when we don’t get enough sun??? (Very proud of herself while asking this)
Me: how unreliable the quantity of solar and wind electricity is!!! Wind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing nearly completely, and solar produces very little in the winter months, when we need most energy as its dark inside.
Shrinidhi: So why shouldn’t we use the sun light directly?
Ashwin: Only solar power and nuclear power (including nuclear fusion in maybe a couple of decades) remain as a long term energy source. Nuclear power I do not really like since
there are two big problems, the risk of a nuclear accident and the still not solved problem of the nuclear waste. Nuclear fusion is far away (decades) from becoming practical. Therefore remains only one energy source.
Shrinidhi: I’m sure in future we build solar cells which will have significantly better energy efficiency, but we should not wait until this happens.
Ashwin: In the most countries we have reached already the point of grid parity (the point where it is cheaper to install a solar power plant than to build a Cole power plant).
Me: we can further can observe is that countries which high government support schemes/programs are leading the statistics like Germany, Italy, Spain, France and more. Germany accounted nearly one third of global solar PV capacity although Germany is not the optimal place for PV, in Spain for example have 50% more solar hours/year.
Ashwin: You are so right!!!We can influence the solar power progress a lot by political actions, and therefore increase the speed of dropping the price, which will allow a faster
adaption towards renewable energy.
Me: Folks who insist that Nuclear is the only way should just consider our Star- the Sun- as their nuclear source- and be grateful that it is so far away that we don’t have to be concerned with the difficult problem of protecting our children and ourselves from the awful effects of radiation sickness and exposure which leads to genetic mutation, cancer and other illnesses.
Ashwin: Solar is Nuclear Power- (If one Truly believes we live in a Nuclear Model Universe)
P.S GO TESLA!!!!!!! 🙂
