Isn't this true of all "green technologies" though?
To varying degrees, yes, but of course you have the same environmental costs to deal with at the point of building/manufacturing whether you're building a green power plant or a coal fired one.
I read a fascinating article in National Geographic saying that the whole of the USA could be powered by 100 sq km of solar array out in some unused piece of desert. A similar project in the sahara could power all of Europe. Now that's a lot of solar reflectors, but nowhere near as much as one might expect. What are we waiting for? Ah yes, diplomatic and economic agreements between several dozen countries. Forget that then!
A couple of years ago I went along to
All Energy, a conference in Aberdeen on the UK energy industry, and renewables in particular. So interesting - there's just so many diverse ideas and ways of doing things. The main general points I remember them making were, roughly:
- Meeting the gov's energy targets is an enormous challenge but, crucially, do-able.
- It can't be done using any one technology, but will be a mixture of everything, almost certainly involving nuclear to some degree, at least to start with. (One of my favourite quotes was that IF, for example, one were to think about meeting the targets using wind power alone, we would need to be putting in a new turbine every 4 minutes for the next 20 years!)
- Infrastructure for power storage and distribution need some serious thought*.
- Some of the biggest hurdles are to do with the supply chain - the UK's manufacturing capabilities not being what they once were.
*I think in that same NatGeo article, it mentioned a potential plan for using people's electric cars batteries plugged in all over the country as a distributed storage network - seems like a genius idea if you can get it to work.
Back to the topic, electric cars make a lot more sense in the context of some future energy economy based on renewables - which will no doubt be a long time coming.
Back to the
actual topic, I agree with whoever it was that mentioned the acceleration those things are capable of - that'd be awesome!
