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Monday, April 14, 2008 12:00 AM

The technology that will save humanity

The solar energy you haven't heard of is the one best suited to generate clean electricity for generations to come.

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  • Monday, April 14, 2008 04:50 AM

    @nonmammalphageous--No such thing as a free lunch

    Actually thermo-solar power is much more useful than the method you propose. While hydrolysis through a catalyst is interesting it is also stupidly ineffectient and not as sustainable as you claim. The major issue is you can't get energy from nothing. While there are elements such as platinum that allow this they are consumed by the reaction and would require energy to reclaim.

    For some reason I don't think using up an gram of platinum per gram of hydrogen would be an efficent method. While it is an interesting phenomenon there is still no way you can get more energy than you put in. Which is why hydrogen is only a fuel transport not an energy source.

    Also one useful thing about thermo-solar over photovoltiac solar is that it can keep producing energy without sunlight, sometimes after it has been cloudy for days. The trick is to have a large enough mass of the carrier fluid they heat. It will retain the heat for quite a while and continue to boil water and provide power. How much energy is contained is the temperature times the specific heat time the mass. So you can see that with enough mass and a high enough temperature you can have enough stored heat to keep things going till the sun comes back. Which makes selection of this fluid important to the design of the power plant.

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