Now, supposing that our solar panel capacity increases by something reasonable every year, like 25%, how many decades would that take to cover square miles upon square miles upon square miles with collectors, and, given that power demands will rise in those decades, how much longer will it take to catch up to that again? How expensive will it be, in light of an effectively infinite demand during those periods where it hasn't been completed yet?
Some people see these charts and see possibility. I see the sheer scale of the operation and boggle; it's absurd.
Think about cost and scale the already existing power infrastructure of oil fields, coal mines, pipelines, refineries, supertankers, gas stations and power plants.
That's mind-boggling too, you just don't think about it because it's already there.
Yes, that's right. The project being proposed is merely several orders of magnitude larger than all existing infrastructure created up to now.
That's exactly my point; I do grasp how much that took, and then to propose that we could solve all our problems by just doing a thousand times more work (or more) is just silly.
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Now, supposing that our solar panel capacity increases by something reasonable every year, like 25%, how many decades would that take to cover square miles upon square miles upon square miles with collectors, and, given that power demands will rise in those decades, how much longer will it take to catch up to that again? How expensive will it be, in light of an effectively infinite demand during those periods where it hasn't been completed yet?
Some people see these charts and see possibility. I see the sheer scale of the operation and boggle; it's absurd.
Think about cost and scale the already existing power infrastructure of oil fields, coal mines, pipelines, refineries, supertankers, gas stations and power plants.
That's mind-boggling too, you just don't think about it because it's already there.
Yes, that's right. The project being proposed is merely several orders of magnitude larger than all existing infrastructure created up to now.
That's exactly my point; I do grasp how much that took, and then to propose that we could solve all our problems by just doing a thousand times more work (or more) is just silly.
Any numbers to back up that claim?