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It seems like many of these approaches would negatively impact power production from solar panels. If you assume that people won’t dramatically lower their powe
by derstander 6y ago
It seems like many of these approaches would negatively impact power production from solar panels. If you assume that people won’t dramatically lower their power usage (which may certainly be a false assumption) then you effectively make people who use solar power more reliant on fossil fuels.
It would also be interesting if the article included a cost comparison for this sort of wide-scale heretofore untested geo-engineering against just building more renewable/low-carbon power generation; the latter is fairly proven tech at this point.
- bamboozled 6y agoConsidering solar panels aren’t 100% efficient, then I don’t see how losing some light would matter ? I don’t think every single photon that hits the panel is utilised. Curious about this actually.
- sebastialonso 6y agoThis is like saying put less gasoline in your car, since internal combustion engines are not 100% efficient, it won't make any difference enough to matter.
- bamboozled 6y agoI’m saying that if 2% of sun light is blocked I don’t think it will make much difference. If it does, build the panels 2% bigger.
- xeyownt 6y agoNote that it will be 2% on everything. Also, crop production, basically all sources of energy on the planet, except nuclear. If all source of renewable energy can be made 2% bigger, why don't we do that today? What's the point of harming our only true source of renewable energy?!?
- bamboozled 6y agoBecause this is an insurance policy to guard against the worst case scenario ?
- curryst 6y ago> except nuclear > our only true source of renewable energy?!? These things appear to contradict each other. I also can't understand the logic of "we can't use nuclear power, but please don't stop the rays from nuclear explosions far away from killing us all". If my options are let the sun kill us all, or run a risk of nuclear meltdown here on earth, my vote is firmly in the "block out the sun and run on nuclear power plants" camp.
- derstander 6y agoFor scale, Wikipedia says the US has 97,275 megawatts of installed photovoltaic and concentrated solar power capacity combined as of the end of 2020. If you add 2% loss onto that, you lose about 1,945 megawatts.