|
 Believe
it or not, but solar power has long had a track record as the real favourite in the energy stakes against atomic
power. Oh, sure splitting the atom might give you near
limitless energy, but why go through all that fuss and bother when the
Sun rains down free power for the taking from dawn to dusk?
No wonder that forecasters as late as the 1950s were predicting that
atomic plants would only be common in the high latitudes or for
specialised applications like powering spaceships. Even Hugo
Gernsback, who was as keen a proponent of atomic power as any,
predicted in his novel Ralph 124C41+ that the world's energy
needs would be met by vast farms of photovoltaic panels (he called
them helio-dynamophores), which would automatically track the Sun
across the sky like so many mechanical sunflowers. In fact, he
even went a step further by ringing the solar panels with a set of
weather control machines called meteoro-towers that produced a
partial vacuum in the atmosphere between the panels and the Sun. How shifting and maintaining a 200 mile high cylinder of partial
vacuum is supposed to be energy efficient, I have no idea,
But despite all this optimism, solar power has had to run the race
with a couple of very real hadicaps. First, the Sun doesn't
shine all the time. If you live in England or western Washington
it hardly shines at all. Second, when it does shine it just
doesn't send along all that much power per square foot, so no matter
how many clever mirrors or lenses you use to concentrate the Sun's
beams for your sun motors, they still need to cover an incredibly
large area to do any good. Verdict: solar power doesn't scale up
very well. So far solar power has been great for small scale
applications such as for boats, portable electronics and satellites,
but we still have a long wait before our factories and cities run on
bottled sunshine. |
