Looking at it. I mean what an amazing debate. Actually there are no real/ideal solutions or perfect solution for our problem. This topic remains of great interest today.

To say:

Simply, I thank you, guys, clean thread, lot of ideas, nice posts from you all.

Back to the topic. Very nice contribution.

I don't think there are lot of solutions. Humans f**k up their planets, but they actually have no other options or solutions to live ... That's the all matter/problem.

I recall this book in 1960 stating that they wanted US completely towards renewable energy (-you may find it in google books), but finally they haven't really managed when you look back until now.

indeed, compared to Pompeii and Herculaneum which after Vesuvius erupted were buried for 1500 years, volcanoes can make surrounding areas uninhabitable for centuries, compared to less than a century with nuclear accidents.

more along the lines of how are you going to get such a structure to mars (or even the moon for that matter) in the first place, getting energy back is the 'easy' part, energy travels at the speed of light, thus would take seconds to minutes to reach earth, though keeping the beam aligned while both celestial bodies move is a whole different matter.

+1 to that, there are a whole lot of things that are just plain inaccurate with wall-e.

While a nice thought. Plus I wish I could afford the panels and batteries and switching gear.

You should broaden your horizons a bit, on how to generate power.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFPj9frhKuo

There are hundreds of these in my neck of the woods. With jobs opening up to construct more. Plus maint. jobs also.

For a country like Japan and other island countries or earthquake prone zones. I would suggest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-...idal-farm.html

Another one I like to see in hot geophysical areas is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_electricity

http://www.greenprophet.com/2011/01/...energy-summit/

As Solar power (I live in the desert where it is abundant) is not as cost effective as using wind YET. It would be nice if solar power was affordable though for as home user.

I wish Tesla was still alive. Or some one like him with his ideas and genius.

So there are many options for using renewable energy. Once corp. and politics can figure out how to profit on it. I sure hate all these underground nuclear waste dump sites popping up in the desert lately though. Politicians, (can't live with em, can't (Fill in the blank____________ em).
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78D05120110914

I don't know but
those massive/structural/protective components in metals, - there is actually lot of tons for lot of plants, what they do with them? They recycle them, and we found them back into our forks, spoons, ... or others? It might be really lot of metal materials. I've never heard about it.

Umm... AFAIK, large volcano eruptions actually help plant life a lot, so they don't make areas uninhabitable. If I remember correcly, lava (when cools down and turns to stone) contains plenty of minerals which allows plants to grow on top of it (see lava rock plants), so while volcano will wipe all all humans, life should recover fairly quickly. Again, the info is from some Cousteau film I saw very long time ago.

Not quite, IMO it is opposite. Building a plant on mars is the easy part - if mars contains minerals, then you could send an army of robots there to establish industrial chain. This will require a lot of planning, and is quite complicated, but (IMO) can be done. The problem is actually with energy transfer. Light would take 14 minutes to travel between earth and mars, both planet rotate, both planets move around the sun (and have different orbital periods), and distance between them vary, plus there's insane distance. So there are multiple problems:

• Obviously, no matter what method you'll use to transfer energy, between planets, there will be significant loss (I'll be surprised if usable amount gets through at all).
• To send some kind of beam between planets, you need line of sight visibility. I'm not sure what are you going to do when there's sun between earth and mars (shoot beam through sun? Sounds like a dubious idea - sun is the only source of light in solar system, and I you wouldn't want to "break" it accidentally). Line of sight visibility requires orbital satellite for transferring/receiving energy, and it should be aligned to other planet.
• Line of sight visibility adds additional problem - planet rotate, and satellites must be aligned to each other. Which means you won't be able to maintain line of sight visibility between energy plant and the satellite.
• And there's a problem of transferring energy from/to orbital satellite, when you can't maintain line of sight with it.
• Also, if you're going to "beam" energy somehow, then your energy beam immediately turns into death ray (especially if you, say, use laser to transfer it). You don't want this thing to miss a receiver and fry a city or two, you know.

In other words, this is not an efficient solution, no matter how you look at it.
What you COULD do is to launch fleet (Mars-Earth-Mars) of freighter ships loaded with accumulators. This is more realistic, but there are two other problems:

1. You need better accumulators (see nanotube capacitator I mentioned before).
2. If I remember correctly, taking 1 kg of matter to orbit currently costs few thousands of $$$s, and one shuttle launch is $450000000. Which means that if you're going to use rockets, then 1 kg of matter in freighter ship should contain enough power to beat launch cost AND compete with land-based powerplants (which, I think, is impossible). A better solution would be to build space elevator (which would reduce launch cost, and could alow you to use different propulsion), but in this case, in addition to remotely building power plant, you'll have to remotely build orbital elevator on mars. Which is gonna be MUCH more complicated and expensive.

And there's one final counterargument. Why use Mars for solar power plant? Mars is 4th planet. Earth is the 3rd. At this point you should be able to guess that mars gets less light than earth, so building solar power there is pretty much pointless. Also, it has atmosphere. If you really want to build solar plant on another planet, then Mercury would be a much better candidate (1st planet from Sun). Or it could be possible to build solar power plant in space, but that is pure science fiction - we probably won't see anything like that any time soon.

that article is about global effects of aerosols, not the localized effects of ash fall, which can ecologically devastate an area for a LONG time, and in the case of a caldera such as Yellowstone 'localized' would be 1/3 to half the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_ash

If that's the inevitable conclusion, then why are we discussing this? Let's just enjoy our time while we have it.

no the issue isn't whether solar power is possible, the question is making it cost effective.
this article in popular science describes how if we were to replace the asphalt and concrete in our roadways and parking lots with solar panels, the US would have significantly more energy produced then we need, it's a project that's currently in research phase.

So if/when government funded research cracks possibly insurmountable problems in the durability requirements, you would get a solar power system costing only 14 times as much investment per Mwh as traditional large scale solar projects, but probably with shorter operational lifetime and higher ongoing maintenance than traditional large scale solar.

Traditional large scale solar is at least a factor of three away from being cost effective, so you want to solve that with a technology that (with lots of optimistic assumptions) might be only 14 times worse ?!?

You're in good company. With wind and all other forms of green energy, the left resists any nearly practical real world projects that could have a tiny positive impacts while proving the lack of choices other than nuclear for the big problem. The left prefers wild dreams about fantasy power sources, because they appeal to the mathematically challenged, they will never need to be tested, and they ultimately lead to power rationing which means vastly increased authority for those who put themselves in charge of the rationing.

meh, the point is about replacing an existing infrastructure (roads), which do nothing but consume energy to maintain, and replacing them with solar panels that produce energy, and the goal is to reduce the cost of doing so to be not significantly more than the cost of maintaining highways today, with the additional bonus of having them actually PRODUCE energy.

Maybe you missed the fact that the professor in Futurama is a parody. Sorry I don't have the exact wording of the quote: "Science is anything you can imagine".

All our entertainment media (including supposed science journalism) intentionally confuses science with magic.

So whose point do you mean with "the point is". Either way you're wrong.

For the politicians and journalists who promote nonsense like that article you linked, the very real point is to confuse the public to prevent the construction of adequate power infrastructure to lead to rationing.

For anyone looking to balance power needs and costs (including all externalities) making use of road surface cannot be a goal, it could only be a means. If using road surface for solar power generation had the potential to be a cost effective method of power generation, then it could be part of the solution. But even though that wildly optimistic article describes results far better than can now be achieved, it doesn't describe results that approach cost effective.

Imagine those panels lasted long enough to have economic payback even at zero interest rate before they need to be replaced. That means they last longer than concrete road surface (just lasting longer than asphalt couldn't hope to reach pay back). What the heck are they made of?? In the decades it takes us to invent that super surface material (transparent, more durable than concrete, not too slippery when wet, reasonable cost) we wouldn't solve some not quite so hard problems such as safe fusion power?

Remember, that super strong surface material is an incremental cost over the semiconductors and other materials for the photo voltaic panel. In the science is magic world of our entertainment media, you combine the properties of a concrete road area and an ordinary solar panel and get something that costs less than building one of each. In the real world, it costs far more than building one of each.

Such research and gradual improvements have been ongoing for many decades with significant progress. The market for hybrid cars is pushing a much higher level of such research than has existed in the past. But the room for improvement is fairly bounded. As a cost effective supporting technology for solar panels (to cover times when the sun isn't shining) batteries are science fiction, not science. For hybrid cars, the goal of much current research is long term lifetime, not just how long or efficiently can a battery hold a charge, but how many times can you charge and discharge it before it wears out. The amount of energy you can store per unit weight or per unit cost would be wonderful to improve further, but it has already been subject to so much research that further improvement cannot be easy.

Portable energy (such as for a car) always costs a lot more than energy on the grid. So an expensive hybrid car battery that wears out in six years of daily use would be an impressive but possible improvement to current technology. It could make hybrid cars actually cost effective without the government subsidies and other market distortions. But use that same level of battery technology (a little beyond what we actually have) in the power grid and you are spending far more in replacements every six years than can possibly be justified by the value.

Anyway don't ask for the "start" of research that is already very well funded and has been in progress for many decades.

High temperature large scale solar projects seem to be more efficient (than any other form of solar). They use some intermediate material rather than directly boiling water, because that allows lower capital costs per amount of energy. It also allows some thermal storage (more efficient than batteries) to partially deal with the difference between the profile of sunlight by time of day vs. the profile of electricity demand by time of day.

So where you have low cost desert land at a moderately low latitude in a place with a not terribly corrupt government, and near a place with high demand for electricity, you have the potential for solar to be almost competitive.

That is never going to add up to a significant fraction of the world's energy production.

I'm not sure any government is non corrupt enough for that to be a sane investment. The up front costs before results are too big a fraction.
1) Private funding: Once it's built, the government will decide those rich individuals or corporations don't deserve the ongoing income and will confiscate or tax to the point of confiscation.
2) Public funding: As we see with billions in less sound solar projects, government funding goes to projects controlled by the big contributors to the most corrupt Democrats. The supposed project is just a cover. The money goes out the back door in a variety of ways leading by complicated paths into the pockets of those campaign contributors. Except for rare glitches (like Solyndra) the disaster can be easily hidden past the end of even a second 4 year term. But ultimately it is a hole that money goes into and electricity does not come out.

I wasn't talking about improving current technology further, but about searching for different means of storing power. If there's not much room for improvement, it makes sense to search for entirely different approach.

There was actually a nuclear meltdown before chirnobyl: It was in Idaho, but was more successfully covered up. It wasn't as bad, though, because it was a smaller meltdown in a much less populated area. Here's a wikipedia page on it.

Fusion would be much nicer: It only generates neutrons and helium (assuming Heavy Water fusion) which settle down quite quickly (just let the neutrons hit some water and you get more fuel), and puts out a lot more power, but it has some real problems to go along with it, like melting just about anything we can contain it with. Cleaner than nuclear, smaller than Solar, cheaper (in concept) than just about anything. Just doesn't work quite yet, outside of the weaponized industry.

Also, I bet we could use fusion energy to break down the radioactive isotopes from fission (classic nuclear) reactors, so no more waste there either: It would be fairly trivial to break it down into something stable.