Different focus on reducing carbon emissions

I agree (mostly) completely with most of what you said. I think above all else, a concerted, cogent, concentrated effort is what is required.

"How about, reducing consumption?"

Of course that goes without saying!!!

 

Dead right here. No one angle automatically excludes all others in the same way coal and gas fired power exist now side by side. Why not a combination of solar, wind, hydro, tide, wave, biomass, geothermal, and what ever else pops onto the scene? Couple that with more efficient use and distribution and we have a winner.

Why not global energy cooperation. Don't put all our eggs in one basket and share energy conversion around the globe. By working on more efficient distribution networks perhaps we can use a global grid to distribute renewable energy around the world. Make power where and when the sun shines and share it globally.

 

For world electricity needs only, there was a nice post on realclimate that illustrated the size of the solar panels necessary. It's the black square, here, which is 231 KM on a side:




The full post is here:


RealClimate: An open letter to Steve Levitt

But now that I look at that, that calculation looks wrong. Let me do my own calculation.

Realclimate lists world electricity use at roughly 17 trillion KWH.

A well-sited panel might produce 1.8 KWH per year, per installed watt (= 5 peak hours/day x 365 / 1000 to get the kilo). Let me round down to 1.7 KWH/year.

So you'd need roughly 10 trillion installed peak watts of solar to satisfy world demand. (More, actually, because the peak watt figures are for panel output, and don't include the losses in converting to AC.)

How big would that be? There's a range, but 10 (peak) watts per square foot is a reasonable average, I think. So that's 1 trillion square feet of solar cell = about 36,000 square miles = a square about 190 miles on a side.

OK, that's ballpark for the realclimate estimate. My 190 miles would be 313 KM on a side, instead of their 231. Pretty much a bullseye, given the slack in the calculation.

So the black square on the globe above is pretty much to scale - that's the total solar panel needed to replace all current electricity use worldwide.

At current prices of about $4/peak watt for the panels,

Solar Photovoltaic, PV Module, Panel Prices

that 10T peak watts is $40T dollars, or the value of 2 to 3 years of US GDP. More than half of one year of the entire world's GDP. That's quite a bit of money. (If it could be done -- clearly capacity constraints would prevent making a rapid change. Current production capacity worldwide is only about ... depending on whom you believe ... maybe 20 billion watts/year. So making 10 trillion watts worth of cells would take a long time at current production rates.)

But if Nanosolar ever gets their reputed cost of $0.25/watt by printing the cells, you could drop roughly by a factor of 20. (They claim $1/watt now.) If so, we'd be talking about a one-time purchase of $2T in solar cells. That's less than one year of US government spending. That's maybe 3 years of our military budget, or 5 years of our Medicare budget.

OK, plus some additional infrastructure. (But also, no need to turn off (e.g.) Niagara falls or other renewable sources.)