If all of mankind’s energy was supplied through solar panels would the effect be big enough to decrease the temperature (since light is converted in part to electricity)?
If all of mankind’s energy was supplied through solar panels would the effect be big enough to decrease the temperature (since light is converted in part to electricity)?
Yes, because if we build enough of them they’ll suck up all the heat from the sun’s rays. However, they would also suck up all the light. And because it would be so dark and cold, people would need their heating and lights on at all times, so the energy consumption actually would go up. My chiropractor calls it “The Solar Panel Paradox”.
@sighofannorance
@rayquetzalcoatl
Jokes aside, Solar Panels are something like ~15%% efficient, the rest of the light doesn’t get absorbed by the panels. Only ~48% of solar energy gets absorbed by the earth’s surface, ~23% gets absorbed by atmospheric particles, the rest just leaves. So the atmospheric temperatures wouldn’t change much.
If you power Red-Yellow-Blue +ultraviolet LED grow lights for a “full spectrum” effect then you’re still using less power on the lights than the solar panels would absorb.
To reach GHG neutral emissions by 2035 would take adding AT LEAST something like 64 Terawatts of solar. So if a 1MW solar power plant takes up approximately 0.02 sq km (5 acres) then 1,280,000 sq km of solar would do it.
math note: (Somebody needs to check the math on this part because for some reason consumer panels are rated more like 183 watt / sq m which is 3.6 MW for the same size (note that 1 sq km is 1000000 sq m because of the rise in power (no pun intended)), just astronomically different than the 1 MW from the big plant…)
Good news, then! We can put the whole damn thing in 1/9th of the Saharan Desert! Or if we trusted that weird consumer number then we can put the whole thing in Montana! That leaves 99.749% of the earth’s surface open to get hit by the sun’s bullshit as nature intended alongside the 85% of the 0.251% that didn’t get absorbed by the panel.
Of course, becoming carbon neutral doesn’t offset the methane gasses emitted by the arctic as a result of current levels of warming, and producing more than 67-70 TW of electricity is pointless because we aren’t actually using that much power currently. One potential thing we could try is storing excess power underground such as with molten salt, or storing it on the moon or even as an additional satellite where the material would naturally cool over time.
Your Chiropractor sounds like they’re equally credentialed in thermodynamics as they are in medicine.
He cricks my neck real good so he must know a thing or two