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A Vision for the FutureThe best way to stop rising CO2 is to have Earth sequester it by growing more vegetation. More crops, more forests and less deserts... Yes, deserts can be converted to not just energy fields, they can solve humanity's most basic needs, food and water. The attractive solution is to convert the deserts into seawater greenhouses. Simple evaporation creates fresh water needed for crops and for cleaning mirrors used for concentrated solar power. The energy gleened from the mirrors is used to power the pumps and fans needed by the greenhouses. Almost all the energy needed by cities and millions of electric cars can also be generated 24/7 with larger mirror fields and heat reservoirs.
America needs to stop building any more new fossil fueled plants. Global warming is cause for concern. However, a more real and sinister scenario will play out if we do not phase out fossil fuels in a timely manner. This is commonly known as peak oil, which will turn into post oil death of civilization if alternatives are not developed on a vast scale. This calls for an aggressive renewable energy approach. This means that the PV industry has to lower their prices! Feed in tariffs are the solution.
There is such a machine called the 1 gigawatt production tool. It will produce miles of efficient solar PV material every year. Just a few hundred of these machines can erase the need to build anymore old fashioned centralized powerplants and 30,000 of them would produce ALL the electricity needed to completely convert over to almost 100% clean electricity (assuming an almost all electric fleet as well). That's just for one year`~' Much fewer such printers would be needed over the course of about a decade or two. Each would produce about a gigawatt of solar capacity per year (and they could be designed to "print" much faster).
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Feed in tariffs would greatly expand this clean energy choice as the concept does not require more taxes from an already torn tax base. They should cause a boom that creates many jobs, lowers CO2, and even reduce oil imports by use of electric cars. Feed in tariffs require the utilities to charge more per ratepayer as an almost unlimited amount of customers would have the option to get paid for producing solar electricity. Once PV technology is mass produced, FITs would decrease and not be needed. The technology is already here to make panels way cheaper (and efficiently) than they are now. FITs create a much larger demand which causes competition and more production. Again, the FITs have to be structured such that the utility does not have to pay too much per kWh generated. Germany's feed in was too high. This is because the industry was less developed and they recieve less sunlight. With PV automation, the feed in would only have to be such that anyone installing should break even in just a few years (hence the need for robotic automation in many factories). This way, if 20% of the nation's electrical needs were generated by PV, it still would not cost ratepayers an arm and a leg to pay for the neighbor's solar system!
Quality (but inexpensive) solar panels should be on every sunny carport, on as much roof space as possible, covering all parking lots, and yes, even on some of the desert without the need to require subsidies past a simple production tax credit. Environmentalists must help create laws that ensure that the building of solar farms do not require the scraping of the ground.
Feed in tariffs are the least expensive answer because the number of installed solar systems are not limited to government hand outs. That gives investors a green light without worries of dried up tax funds or expiring tax credits. Yet FITs have to be structured such that they don't put too much of a premium on PV produced electricity. The people of Germany pay about the equivalent $5 extra per month, yet they produce some 13% or more of their power from renewable sources. Even though not all of Germany's people can install panels, about 80% agree that it is worth it! They are kicking out the solar! In a desert, humanity can build very large arrays of mirrors and molten salt heat resevoirs necessary to boil water many hours after the sun sets. Coupled with a steam generator built tough enough to produce electricity from a nuclear plant, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) can provide almost all of our energy needs. With wide distribution throughout the southwest, a large cloud will only slow down productivity of CSP. Also with multiple time zones, the intermittancy is reduced further. With widespread wind turbines, intermittancy will blend in with the solar mix creating enormous RE capacity. This type of solar energy will be necessary IF a cheap electrical storage system is not developed as CSP can store its heat for many days without much thermal loss. Designs would probably call for up to eight hours of storage during average electrical generation. Many people oppose CSP because it requires lots of transmission lines and can quite literally damage the deserts. Again, environmental laws would have to be created that prevents water usage (air cooling costs more) and bulldozing. Also, large centralized energy systems should not interfere with the acceleration of PV technology. 
By use of cheaper mirrors, the Concentrated PhotoVoltaics (or CPV) industry has the ability to collect many hundreds of times the energy before any rare elements are used up! This means that if, for example, "only" 20 gigawatts of production is available from estimated mining researves of indium, gallium and selenium, needed to make CIGS thinfilm panels, CPV would increase that by hundreds of times! Reseach has shown that such materials are used in record breaking multi-sun PV cells. 100 to about 1,000 "suns" are concentrated onto the small cells which convert up to 41% of the suns energy into electricity. This is about 3 times as efficient as normal PV. The downsides are issues dealing with heat dissapation and much higher costs per square millimeter of PV chip. CPV requires the same tracking precision as concentrated solar thermal.
Solar energy can "convert" the whole planet to clean electricity all by itself! It appears that the best way to achieving that end is with properly structured feed in taraffs. That would cause a boom in silicon PV. Silicon based PV material is the time tested, clear winner when it comes to availability of raw materials (Supply issues are caused by the inability to make it fast enough). Given enough automated factories, the whole planet could be covered. CIGS thinfilm, on the otherhand, is limited to materials with almost the rarity of silver. It is not easy to create thousands of gigawatts with such limited supply, especially as these metel prices would most probably rise exponentially if used on such a scale. Concentrated PV can prevent such depletion. Concentrated solar thermal power by use of billions of mirrors can indeed provide almost unlimited power, as these components are basically the same as those in conventional powerplants. It's downfall is that most people will be against large mirrored over sections of the deserts and thus much enviromental litigation. However, CSP is the only renewable that can store its energy onsite (and with very little loss) until such time to generate. Its cost per watt is less than that of PV and its mirrors reflect more light back into space. Another advantage to CSP is that it can support seawater greenhouses placed in the deserts needed for fresh water and more food!
WITHOUT ENERGY, THERE IS NO FREEDOM |
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