Then we’re all set for full electrics powered by utility solar.

Even if we could make technology that’s 100% efficient at capturing the sun’s energy at the Earth’s surface, it would take something like four square miles of solar collectors (solar panels, concentrating mirrors, lenses, whatever) to replace a single 1 GW power plant.

That’s a heck of a lot of land — and a heck of a lot of equipment to be built, placed, and maintained. And really a rather large and dramatic ecological footprint.

What, exactly, makes that superior to even the worst power plant in current use?

H2 today is generated from gas stocks. To do so via electrolysis is to incur a 30% entropy loss in the conversion process. Does not make much sense under those terms. As for storage of solar, well if you go to megascale why not use underground salt domes? Pump the air in, store it, release it against an air turbine to extract the energy? In the same vein, there is already an airpowered car that is near release. No pollution from the car and is suited for urban needs where distances are not great.

Having a viable solar/nuke substructure will help mitigate against future gas hikes. But we have to begin soon. Otherwise we just remain hostage to the middle east.

Nuclear fusion for any form of energy: no ! The energy required to maintain the electromagnetic ‘bottle’ containing the fusion reaction offsets any energy which may be obtained from the (very difficult to control) reaction.

I should clarify that I’ve got nothing against using oil. Personally, I’m in favor of (carefully and responsibly) drilling for oil anywhere it’s available, and making use of coal. My stepping-off point for this particular blog post was alternatives to oil. I don’t think we’ll switch from oil or coal primarily because of climate change or peak oil either one — I think we’ll do it because better alternatives become available. It’s been observed that we didn’t leave the stone age because we ran out rocks; I think the same principles are in play now.

I suppose I could also “clarify” that I’m okay with nuclear, but seeing as it was the first energy source I named, and seeing as I have written in favor of it multiple times times over the past few years I’m not sure how much clearer I can get.

Storage is a big problem, but not as hopeless as John and M. Simon would have us believe. The blog post about CSP linked above talks about some very encouraging developments in storing solar heat, which can then be converted to electricity.

And, rather than just waving hydrogen about as a magic solution, some folks are taking steps towards seeing if it will work. And there are efforts underway to take on potentially bigger challenges than fueling cars.

Maybe those less-than-bright MIT students will heed Simon’s advice and get to work on the storage problem. But even if they don’t, there are a lot of different people approaching it from a lot of different angles. Flywheels are one possible alternative to batteries for large-scale power storage. For powering cars, we may yet end up using oil or synthetic oil substitutes made from shale or coal. And we may combine those with methanol and ethanol (made from sane, non-food sources) to round out our selections.

None of which means that we have to keep emitting CO2 at the same or a greater rate — seeing as research continues into how to burn oil and coil more cleanly than before. Still, since I’m sure objections can be raised to all of these ideas, we must assume that progress in any of these areas (or some unexpected area) is quite simply impossible.

Nope. You forget, we use oil for other things besides gassing up the fliver. Even after we convert all our vehicles and power stations to [something else], we’ll still need to grease the wheels. It will be a long time before we have no use for oil.

That being said, the real advantage to switching to solar or some similar energy source is the distribution cost. By some estimates it costs a gallon of gasoline’s worth of energy to delivery each gallon of gas to the pump. There’s an unavoidable energy cost in pumping, transporting, and refining the raw stock as well as transporting it to the filling station. Solar delivers itself: you put a converter device on your roof (PV, thermal, etc.) and flip a switch inside to use it. Father Sun takes care of everything but the wiring. You don’t have to beg foreign governments to let you have some of theirs, you get enough locally to take care of your house/city/state/nation. Your “solar singularity” will be quite dramatic when it reaches the tipping point in 10-15 years and everything starts to change.

Motors are low reliability items. Look at the Zome Works idea – fluid flows from a heated tank to a cooled tank to aim the collector. No moving or electrical parts.

1 sq meter = 100 sq ft. the collector had better come in at 50¢ or less a sq ft to make it economical. Because the rest of the money is going to have to go into high temp solar cells and thermal collectors.

Oh, yeah. It will need to last 20 years. It will have to withstand wind loads. Rain. Snow. Hail storms. Lightning. etc.

Nice idea. It will need some refinement.

If the MIT guys were really bright they would be working on energy storage. That is the # 1 pitfall of most alternatives.

There’s a little problem here: energy storage.

Energy must be stored for periods when there isn’t enough (or any) sunlight. Even worse, it must be stored in a transportable form for automotive transit (the largest user of petroleum today in the US).

The last time we had an energy shock, all sorts of ideas were tossed around about energy storage. Nothing happened. Hydrogen, flywheels, hydroelectric (gravity) storage, etc.

Today, people seem to be ignoring the problem.

Hydrogen is waved about as a magical solution, never mind that it is highly inefficient, hard to store in high energy density, and would require trillions of investment in a national infrastructure in order to use it.

Batteries are likewise imagined to solve the problem. But Moore’s law hasn’t been working there. We have been working on electric cars for over 100 years, and we still aren’t that much better off than the original lead-acid batteries. The best battery technology today (in terms of specific energy density) has a density of 1/40th that of gasoline! And, batteries are way more expensive than gas tanks. They also require a large infrastructural investment to be viable (charging your car 8 hours for 100 miles of use is not very practical).

If oil stays this high, the dramatic economic pain will cause people, hopefully, to demand that we use the power we have – coal and nuclear and offshore oil – and to heck with CO2.

That’s not as irrational as it seems. Today we are engaged in an extreme application of the precautionary principle, strangling energy production at enormous cost in order to avoid a mild climate change (if the completely untestable and questionable models are to be believed at all).

Once solar is cheaper than coal or nukes there is no doubt we can shut down those evil electrical generating plants.

In the mean time it might also be wise to look into this:

WB-7 First Plasma

It’s raining soup. What we need is a decent bucket.

The caveat in all these analyses “Solar Power at 5 cents per kWh” is that fossil fuels have already subsidised, energy-wise, these technologies for which these calculations are made. The chips, the glass or metal which will be used as the focussing mirror, the copper to connect them, the material used for covering – all of them were created during a time when energy was cheap and those assumptions have inherently entered this guys calculations. Shale oil was supposed to become viable at $30 oil. It is still struggling with $120 oil. I’m not sure how much stock you put with Energy Returned on Energy invested analysis, but it is worth giving a look.