The future of solar power
Dennis Orlov
Humans are truly an energy-hungry species. We have this strange obsession with extracting all the energy we can from everything around us. And even if it isn’t fromDIRECTLY around us, we will search underground or investigate the far reaches of the cosmos to power our various commodities, tools, and cities that define the modern-day Earth. The expense of maintaining and advancing a modern-day Earth, however, lies in how we harness the energy to power it. Fossil fuels, (namely coal, crude oil, and natural gas) have been the main source of this energy, accounting for around 80% of the world’s primary energy use. As the name suggests, fossil fuels are derivatives of plant and animal fossils that have been put under pressure for millions of years, with crude oil and natural gas coming mainly from water-borne lifeforms such as plankton as well as plant material, and coal from decayed trees, as well as mostly land-based plant material (this is, however, a generalization – fossil fuels can be composed of all deposits of decayed organic materials). The aforementioned fuels all have one thing in common: they are hydrocarbons, and therefore burnwell. And through this shared quality, their use as an energy source has evolved over the years, from lighting up oil lamps for simple heat and light, to natural gas power stations (which accounts for the largest source of energy in the UK) for powering capital cities. Over the past few decades, the costs inflicted on third-parties through the usage of fossil fuels as an energy source have become more apparent through research, through which they have been linked to global warming (owing to emission of carbon dioxide, and leading to climate change), destruction of the environment due to extraction (most commonly mining and drilling), and the release of various chemicals that cause damage to both the environment and people’s general health ( such as sulfur dioxide, which kills two birds with one stone by causing both acid rain AND pulmonary inflammation). This, combined with the limited availability of fossil fuels as well as rising energy needs, is the recipe for both an energy crisis as well as an environmental crisis. The solution is a switch to a different energy source. While various different energy sources have been experimented with in relation to the realization of said crises – namely, nuclear power (using heat generated from chain reactions caused by nuclear fission to heat water into steam, where a turbine can convert this kinetic energy into mechanical energy, after which an electrical generator converts this into electrical energy), as well as various forms of renewable energy – , the vast majority of them aren’t capable of meeting the ever -rising energy demands of civilization. Currently, the world demand for power sits at around 16 terawatts, which is expected to rise with every year (about 30 TW expected by 2050). Wind turbines can feasibly produce around 2-4 TW, biomass 5-7 TW, tidal energy at around 2 TW, and geothermal can produce 9-7 TW (however, only a small fraction of this is feasible due to significant drilling and exploitation costs). By harvesting energy from the largest fusion reactor in the Solar System – the Sun- the Earth’s energy needs can be met. Hypothetically speaking, if the earth was covered entirely in solar cells with 100% efficiency, we could generate 1.2x10^5 TWof energy, and around 3.6x10^4 TW if all land on earth was
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