Any guesses?
Clicky.

That's a lot smaller than I would have thought.

We should start now!

and with the new type of solar panels available it could be done sooner then expected as every house would be able to generate power …



link to the full article …
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 65592.html

They have given the go-ahead for sea based wind farms here. But the people on the coast are up in arms about what it will do to tourism... Maybe if they got the tourists to leave their mobilephones, cameras, music players, camcorders etc. at home and not to watch TV, DVDs etc. whilst they are visiting, they might not need so many wind turbines...

I like wind farms - but I think as an island nation we should be spending our money on tidal power R&D - were we to perfect it we would not only become self-sustaining, but we'd also become a world leader; we could keep the engineering / manufacturing contracts here and we could sell the technology & hardware...

That's new. I remember being told you'd need to cover all of Australia with solar panels to supply the rest of the world.

I'd heard of this before, in an unrelated post. The estimate was that you would need 3% of the Sahara to supply 300% of Europe's current power needs....or similar.

This isn't a bad idea in some respects, as the biggest group to win over will be the middle east with their current "monopoly" on the energy supply of the world. Tell a ca$h rich arab that he has to stop producing his only means of welath generation and he won't listen. Tell him however that he can make use of all that empty desert instead and ears start pricking....

I believe that the biggest problem to surmount is how to get all that energy to where it's needed, and how to store it. If that can be solved then we're almost there...

True. The same is said of harvesting eneergy from lightning.

Flux capacitor.

I wonder how much energy would be required in order to clean half a million square kilometres of solar panels?

If you were to take away the energy USED by power stations and replace it with the energy USED by these solar panels would there be a net reduction?

They are basing their calculations on a panel efficiency of 20% modern panels can get up to 40% and this is set to rise further.

Assuming this is the usual photo-voltaic cell type of panel, I wonder what the calculations would be like for a steam-powered station?

Edit: remember this by James May? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tt7RG3UR4c

Going back to the windfarms, the German military is holding up the building of around €500M in windfarms, because they cause shadows on their radar systems and they can't accurately track low flying aircraft...

Exactly the same issue that's affecting development of some of the coastal farms here in the UK. It needn't just be the air force, the farms off shore also affect the radar of coastal shipping too.

Not to mention migrating birds.

The one thing that's always overlooked with windfarms is the life expectancy. I heard somewhere that all the turbines have a working life of about 30-40 years, when they need to be replaced.

How is that a saving?

I'm with Snowy - develop tidal, and start to look at the osmosis idea.