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Only 100 square miles of solar panels are required to power the entire United States
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In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss and no more than 50% of the source material, provide a link back to the original article and provide your original comments / criticism in your post with the article.
[quote:Anonymous Coward 77492469:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNjAxMzA3Xzg4NUJDNzU2] [quote:Anonymous Coward 77492469:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNjAxMTc4XzU0MjE5ODZF] [quote:Kung Fu Lover:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNTk5NDYxXzdDMURFQjUw] solar light drops 700 to 1000 watts of Energy continuously, per square meter, when the sun is shining. hell yes we should capture much of that and put it to use. [/quote] Yes, but until recently, most ignored that there isn't only solar light radiation hitting earth, some of which we capture, some of which gets reflected and some of which gets absorbed by earth and heats up the planet. The planet not being at absolute zero, because the sun heats it up, also emits a lot of infrared radiation towards empty space which can be harnessed, especially at night times. The technology required for that is arrays of optical/infrared nano rectennas (rectifying antenna) which is basically a nano sized antenna with one or more nano sized diodes. Usually MIM diodes are used which are quantum tunneling diodes, more suited for this purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_rectenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna The problem with this technology currently, as it appears to me, isn't the nano antennas but the rectifying diodes. The nano antennas already seem to reach a higher than 80% efficiency. The specifications required for the diodes however in order to reach efficiencies of over 50% are immense, this being currently at the forefront of experimentation/research But if successful and they finally manage to produce the required diodes at high enough efficiencies, in theory, you could have solar panels which at day time absorb the incoming sun rays and at night time absorb the infrared radiation emitted by earth into empty space at all times. You could also have clothing with infrared nano rectennas weaved in, such that they would absorb a great portion of the infrared radiation your body emits at all times. Enough radiation to charge your smartphone for example several times over per day. If this technology succeeds in the near future, it will be a game changer since earth emits infrared radiation at all times, independent of day or night or weather. It would make batteries obsolete for the most part. With all such technology however, it is also extremely useful to the military. There are already experiments trying to use this technology to power micro drones just from the environment, without requiring any refueling, which is why there is a chance that a breakthrough already occurred but kept secret. [/quote] Here is a related Article to the above, outlining the main problem briefly "Headlines: Harvesting Earth’s Infrared Energy Proposed by Harvard Physicists" [quote:]What’s holding us back from building this type of energy generating source? We need to do more experimentation with nanomaterials to get just the right ones to optimize the energy we generate. And we need to develop a class of diodes in rectennas that can switch on and off 30 trillion times a second.[/quote] https://www.21stcentech.com/headlines-harvesting-earths-infrared-energy-proposed-harvard-physicists/ that Article is from 2014 and there has been and is a lot of research going on to tackle the above issue [/quote]
Original Message
“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,”
“The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”
It’s “a little square on the U.S. map, and then there’s a little pixel inside there, and that’s the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny.”
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link to www.inverse.com (secure)
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If this were spread over the United States connected by a power grid sounds doable and not very intrusive, the panels also being on top of building roofs.. What we waiting for?
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