Energy Generation

The petition is entitled Promote and bring to fruition the world wide solution to all energy problems and the explanatory notes say

"No doubt wind and maritme energy have environmental benefits.

They are however contentious in terms of transforming local vistas, and their associated development costs, and should of course be continued.

Meanwhile, if you care to get out your old school atlas, observe that all around the equator (and many other areas of desert around the globe) are several million square miles of this planet that are neither inhabited or sustain much life.

They do though have the sun beating incessantly down on them every day.

It is not then that given this fact, that the possible building of infrastructure to collect and distribute this free power from our sun could well be one very important source of the worlds power requirements and dramatically help the climate change situation, and make energy costs low and available to all.

This is an actual acheivable reality."

My first thought was - hang on, have photovoltaic cells actually reached viable yet? As I commented on a previous petition (Environmental Building to be precise) I had a feeling they might cost more energy to produce than they can actually output. But I thought I should check the matter; once again I exhibit my faith in Wikipedia where I find the following paragraph:

"There is a common conception that solar cells never produce more energy than it takes to make them. While the expected working lifetime is around 40 years, the energy payback time of a solar panel is anywhere from 1 to 20 years (usually under five) depending on the type and where it is used (see net energy gain). This means solar cells can be net energy producers and can "reproduce" themselves (from just over once to more than 30 times) over their lifetime.

This is disputed, however, by some researchers who object that such analysis doesn't take into account waste, inefficiency, and related energy costs that would come with a real-world solar cell."

There are three references cited in the paragraph: a paper presented at "Solar 2002 Sunrise on the Reliable Energy Economy" by two Pennsylvania State University researchers; a leaflet from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a 1997 paper published in Solar Progress from the Australia and New Zealand Solar Energy Society by a researcher from the University of New South Wales. In short, I am minded to believe that in fact PV cells can generate more energy than their base cost.

That doesn't, however, make this a completely viable proposal, necessarily. The big problem I see with it is the difficulty of transferring energy in the form of electricity. Or at all, actuall It's a horrifically inefficient process; the vast majority of the energy-use is a long way away from the putative locations of the energy-generation; in short, I'd have to do lots of complicated sums and research to work out how viable this would be, but it doesn't feel great offhand.

Oh, and there's a bit of my brain saying "I don't know much about geography and deserts and things, but doesn't the sand shift a lot? Aren't you going to be having to have some way of keeping the sand off the cells? Or something?" But I may be talking rubbish there.

Having said all that, there are ways and means around it, and of course one could draw it back to yesterday's mockery of the Mad Hydrogen Man. One potentially-efficient solution is to generate the electricity at the equator using solar cells, use that energy to split water and store hydrogen (OK, you have to transport the water there, presumably, which is going to cost more energy), then transport the hydrogen to where the electricity's needed and use it to generate electricity there.

I had basically this conversation with some people at a Go tournament a few months ago (as you do) and I think the conclusion of assorted reasonably knowledgeable people was that this was the efficient way to do things. Probably.

Of course, if I were the impoverished countries who own these bits of land (or rather sand) I'd charge the first world a fortune in rent - a well-calculated fortune, I suppose, so as to not put them off, but if they'd decided to go for it I'd want to make jolly sure my people benefited too.

Perhaps this petition isn't mad after all. I should probably do the sums properly. All the data's available. But I'm not quite that bored at the moment.

The maddest thing about it is also the saddest thing about it - even if it is a viable idea, it's a long-term plan requiring lots of initial investment, and there's no hope of the short-termist politicians we have (here and in the rest of the first world) actually going for such a thing.