Question Earthority!

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
– They Might Be Giants

And eight minutes away at the speed of light lies Earth, under constant bombardment by the rays that process generates.

Not that this is anything you don’t know, but it’s the starting point for two questions.

First, how can we harness all that energy to make our lives better?

Second, what can we do mitigate the consequences of global warming produced by the intersection of those rays and our atmosphere under certain conditions (conditions which many scientists believe obtain right now)?

The answers to those two questions look logically interrelated to me.

Solar energy is the closest thing we can ever hope to get to a “free ride” in terms of useable energy. How much of the stuff is coming at us varies by time of day and year, and by our location on the earth’s surface … but any way you cut it, there’s a lot of it. All we have to do is figure out how to harness it as it comes by.

We’ve always used indirect solar power — for example, solar energy, transformed by chlorophyll in plants, provides many of the calories that our bodies operate on (or our cars, if we use ethanol or biodiesel). And prior to the advent of generated electrical power and such, we used direct solar to do things like dry our laundry.

Robert McLeod thinks we’ve reached the point where indirect solar — converted into electricity — will inevitably become our dominant energy supply. The technological advances we’ve made in capturing and converting it with photovoltaic cells are making it more and more attractive in comparison to mechanically produced or “heat differential” sources.

I think McLeod’s right … and I also think that solar energy will eventually be “the answer” to global warming. Every watt of electricity produced by solar is a watt of electricity that doesn’t have to be produced by burning greenhouse gas producing fossil fuels.

Going beyond McLeod’s predictions:

We’ll probably eventually produce and use much of that energy in space — using giant collectors to intercept solar light and heat before they reach Earth, turning them into energy, using that energy to produce things that can be dropped down earth’s gravity well at little expense (or even finding ways to ship the energy itself earthside), and venting the waste heat into space instead of into our own atmosphere.

Science fiction? Yeah … but so was the submarine in the late 19th century. It’s coming. If you don’t believe me, read G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution.

One of the nice things about solar from my point of view is that it’s going to become dominant due to the market, not to bureaucratic edict. No, I’m not denying that there have been subsidies and such for solar power research — but on the scale of things, solar subsidies are several order of magnitudes below the subsidies given to its competitors, including petroleum, ethanol and hydroelectric. Solar has received lip service and pocket change by comparison, and despite that (or maybe because of it?) it is poised to become less expensive than its competitors anyway … and when it does, the market will fall over itself to profit from that, and we’ll profit as well.