Assume global warming is real, caused by humans, and can be averted through immediate collective action on the part of all humanity.  How then might we analyse what to do about global warming, based on everything we know?
The return on investment, in terms of time required, cost to implement, and immediate impact to cool the planet, [...]

If photovoltaics show promise to totally replace coal as a clean source of electricity, how would they perform to provide fresh water from seawater?

Photo: water-technology.net

Desalinating seawater is not cheap.  Based on costs for a state of the art desalinization facility in Ashkelon, Israel, as reported in WaterTechnology.net, it costs about US $2.0 billion to [...]

We have attempted to estimate the contribution of photovoltaics to global energy production.  Currently the installed base of photovoltaics worldwide has an output of about 5.0 gigawatts.  Since the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours per day, the actual yield is probably about one-third that amount, call it 2.0 gigawatt-years in 2005.  While this installed base is probably set [...]

We’ve been trying for some time to find a good prediction of how quickly worldwide photovoltaic manufacturing is going to increase.  We know in 2005 the entire world production of photovoltaic cells was about 1.6 gigawatts.  How much will we add in 2006?  Where will we be by 2010?

Photo: Sandia National Labs

Because of the revolution [...]

In our previous post, “Earthly Heating,” we noted that because we want to limit CO2 emissions, carbon neutral biofuel plantations crowd out food crops, and in the inner recesses of mega-cities of earth’s equatorial regions, food costs more, and the poor starve.  This is an over-simplification.
It is true that biofuel crops may raise the price of food, [...]

Got your attention?  Probably not.  Earthly heating is an unlikely search phrase.  Actually, of course, this post regards global warming.  And to-date, for the most part, we have posted information about specific aspects of global warming, or in-depth treatments of the subject, always including links galore to help the reader.  But as a topic on the internet, [...]

We may stand guilty of downplaying the future of crystaline photovoltaics.  After all, exponential growth is necessary for alternative energy to take over the world, and after all, it is no simple matter to manufacture crystaline photovoltaics.  But as amply documented in our post “The Coming Boom in Photovoltaics,” the only thing thing that stops [...]