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British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
http://www.x404.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=20320		 Page 1 of 2
Author:  pcernie [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:31 pm ]
Post subject:  British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ate-change

Gonna have to forward that to my Kindle, keep reading the same sentence over and over again at the moment :oops:
Author:  MrStevenRogers [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:40 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
wind power out, sun power in
absolute crap

start building power stations that can burn house hold rubbish
instead of land filling

then we can start to move forward ...
Author:  JJW009 [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:45 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
I produce about one carrier bag of waste in two months. That's not going to keeps the lights on.
Author:  big_D [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 3:29 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
MrStevenRogers wrote:
wind power out, sun power in
absolute crap

start building power stations that can burn house hold rubbish
instead of land filling

then we can start to move forward ...

I think it is a good idea, and we need to reduce waste. There is so much unneeded packaging around products these days and we don't make products to last any more.
Author:  jonbwfc [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 3:45 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
This week's Click on BBC news (and BBC 2 10:30AM tomorrow) was a special on tech in Iceland - I'm sure one forumer would be very interested :) - and one of the points was they plan to go to entirely self-suffient for power within the next 10 years. They're lucky because they have a lot of geothermal but they're also investing heavily in burning refuse for power. It's not particularly green but it's better than coal or importing fuel.

Whether it would be able to entirely compensate for the generation gap we're coming to I don't know - after all Iceland's population is a fraction of the UK's - but it would certainly solve a couple of problems. We make too much rubbish and we don't have enough power generation.
Author:  ProfessorF [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 5:01 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
I suspect that in the future, our energy solution's are going to come from a variety of sustainable resources, some of them large scale, some of them more personal.
There's a team working at Glasgow Uni on cracking a chemical system that'll release energy during the night in much the same way plants do, enabling us to harvest solar power during the day, and still keep the lights on at night.
Fingers crossed and all that.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 5:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
MrStevenRogers wrote:
wind power out, sun power in
absolute crap

start building power stations that can burn house hold rubbish
instead of land filling

then we can start to move forward ...

They are already doing that. Though many areas struggle to build because of NIMBY's. It should be used as an option. It should be included along side renewables, but the problem is that it releases CO2 which will have to be sequestered somehow.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 5:48 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
big_D wrote:
I think it is a good idea, and we need to reduce waste. There is so much unneeded packaging around products these days and we don't make products to last any more.

Reducing waste is also very good as it reduces energy needed to create and move it. Though companies will resist better quality as they can sell the same crap again and again.
Author:  rustybucket [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
Quote:
They acknowledge that a number of scientific breakthroughs will be needed to make cheap solar energy a global prospect. In particular, scientists will have to find ways to reduce the cost of transmitting electricity from areas of high luminosity and low land value to the major population centres of the world. This will require new materials that are much better at conducting electricity, without loss of power, than present methods.

So, unless someone invents either high-temperature super-conductors or industrial scale graphene production, it's a dead duck.

Total ar$e

Dear World, we need Nuclear. Stop f***ing about.
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 6:40 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
Solar cells in labs are now up to 44% efficiency and in sunnier climes solar is already comparable to fossil fuels. Though I think we need wind solar and thorium reactors.
Author:  l3v1ck [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:13 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
+1 for thorium.
Author:  rustybucket [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:35 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
Amnesia10 wrote:
Solar cells in labs are now up to 44% efficiency

So they'll be available in about 20 years? Great.

Amnesia10 wrote:
and in sunnier climes solar is already comparable to fossil fuels.

No it's not.

It never will be.

Solar depends on the weather - burning stuff doesn't

Amnesia10 wrote:
Though I think we need wind solar and thorium reactors.

No.

We only need thorium reactors while we wait for fusion.

Wind and solar are Fisher Price solutions to an adult problem
Author:  jonbwfc [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:15 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
rustybucket wrote:
[We only need thorium reactors while we wait for fusion.

I read an article recently which said thorium had recently 'gone positive' on world metal markets. Essentially, thorium is a residue product of rare earth extraction and the people extracting those elements previously had to pay for disposal of the thorium, which cost more than the thorium was worth. So it was a cost, in jargon a 'negative'. But recently somebody has been buying just about all the thorium that's being produced and is willing to pay so much for it that it's now profitable to sell i.e. It is now 'positive'.

The obvious question is why? I can only think of two reasons. Either someone is building a large scale thorium reactor, or somebody thinks someone else is and is buying the thorium in the expectation of selling it later at a higher price when that third party wants it.

The thing is if you were building a thorium reactor, why bother to keep it quiet? Yet I haven't been able to find reports of anyone doing so at the kind of scale that would require buying enough thorium to affect the price on the world market.

Puzzling.
Author:  ProfessorF [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 10:41 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
That's interesting, because Thorium is practically everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9Ll5EX1jc
Author:  Amnesia10 [ Sun Sep 29, 2013 11:11 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
rustybucket wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
and in sunnier climes solar is already comparable to fossil fuels.

No it's not.

It never will be.

Solar depends on the weather - burning stuff doesn't

From here

Quote:
The price of solar has been plummeting, to the tune of 30% in the past two years.

And that will continue for a while. Current solar cells are around 20% efficient. If you can more than double that it will be cheaper than

Quote:
Many areas have already achieved grid parity, where unsubsidized solar power is on par with or cheaper than retail electricity prices. That’s expected to spread to many more regions in the coming decade:


also
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/may/12/solar-energy-price-fall
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