Have fun with this rant to my friend James...

Hello James,
I don't have Doug's email but I thought of him today when I was reading about new solar power plants being built in Arizona and Nevada.

My fear is that all these solar power plants we are building to "capture" the sun's energy are actually going to exaggerate our planet's move toward global warming. See, even though burning fossil fuels create CO2 and soot (which gets in atmosphere and lands on ice helping it to absorb sunlight and thus melt faster) which trap warm air in our atmosphere, at least burning fossil fuels are net planet neutral for now ie; we get fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them and create pollution but the earth is still getting the same amount of sun light as before and hence since we simply "wasted" all the energy of the sun since the beginning of man (except for with respect to planting crops). We were essentially ignoring the real power and energy of the sun.

Now the dilemma is, if we start "capturing" the sun's energy with solar banks covering thousands and even millions of square miles, over time, we are essentially capturing high amounts of the sun's energy and feeding it into transmission lines and sending it to where it is then "used". Anywhere energy is "used" it generates heat at the "use source". Now this heat is released into the atmosphere and it is real heat that did not originate from "within" the earth's crust.

Let me put it another way. If we are going to be "using" or "burning" fossil fuels this is really no big deal because the earth is a zero sum energy source over the short term ie; it took heat and pressure of the earth's crust to create the "energy" sources we use such as coal and oil and now we are simply transforming that "energy" from the earth to usable sources on the surface again. We are not really sure where oil and coal come from, ie; were they once organic matter that pressure and heat and biological happenings over time converted this organic matter into an "energy source"? Not to try and answer that question here, suffice to say, it took millions if not billions of years for the earth to "absorb" enough of the sun's energy to create enough organic matter to ultimately turn into a burnable energy source which we pull from the earth's crust.

Back to the solar thing. So if you get my drift, what we are essentially doing is accelerating dramatically the earth's absorption of the sun's energy, shoving that energy into our "energy transportation infrastructure" and exporting it back out again as heat. Allot of heat. More heat than the earth would be remotely capable of absorbing without the added technology of the solar panels to be able to absorb. These panels are not "reflecting" the sun's energy and heat back to the atmosphere, they are absorbing every bit of the sun's Light or better put the Sun's electromagnetic radiation. In fact the more they absorb the better the technology for capturing the sun's energy and the more efficient the energy production and unfortunately the more heat is released when the energy is used.

Another technology which provides power from the sun is called concentrated solar power" (CSP). This essentially means creating an array of large concentrators (not unlike you concentrate the sun with a magnifier as a kid and can burn stuff), concentrating the suns energy and using that energy to boil water which turns turbines and creates energy in a more traditional way. (Note: I am more in favor of this type of power generation from sun's energy as these plants can be run by natural gas when the sun's energy is not sufficiently strong and can be use in more northern and southern hemispheres and the boilers store enough energy to run the turbines at night acting as stores of energy.)

To summarize, I thought of Doug because even though we were quite trashed when we were out in the woods talking about wind power and Doug's hilarious observation that the windmills would somehow alter the rotation of the earth and or currents (in the case of under water "current mills") his observation has stuck in my mind and I do believe there is a real need to study the long term effects of so effectively "capturing" the sun's energy in such a way that produces real heat upon it's output.

Hope I did not bore you to death:-)

Patrick