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[Frumple]

If you're going that far you might as well use some of the power locally to run things to keep people out. By the time we actually had solar infrastructure of note in the sahara I'm pretty sure we'd be able to plant some automated stuff around the edges to shoo off (or bury, I guess) scavengers.Think I remember we had the tech for it like a decade or two ago, it's just that the places they'd normally be used had issues with potentially indiscriminate fire and pesky laws and whatnot. Sahara has notably fewer of those concerns >_>

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I cannot bear going back over the past three pages and individually line-by-lining everything right now, but just let it be said that most if not all of the objections raised to solar and wind in this thread aren't true, and some of them are utterly baffling.

And there's no reason to focus on the Sahara. The idea of "paving the Sahara" is popular due to the graphs on how much area would be needed to power, and this is why infographics can do more good than harm. That area is something spread out over the entire world.

This is aside from the Sahara being utterly inhospitable, not much better for w/m2 than most sunny places, and inhabited. For the record, let us nix this conversation about how to "keep out" the human beings who, you know, live there. That's verging on outright colonialism, and it spreads malformed ideas stemming from things like "lol Africans tearing down power lines". People tear down power lines to harvest the metal when the power lines aren't giving them what they're supposed to give them: electricity. Any group of people in need of metal and not receiving power would eventually turn to the power lines, and once one section is down all the rest become even more useless and thus even more likely to be harvested.

[PTTG??]

Highly distributed Solar+battery is actually quite reasonable. It would be even more reasonable if we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels.

[alway]

Some other tidbits about PV solar that make the load balancing problems seem less problematic:
If you look at charts of peak demand, it can generally be summarized by "high during the day, low at night" due to the fact that humans are generally diurnal and our society all but shuts down after 10PM. As such, a good amount of solar power will, if anything, help *reduce* use of peaker plants by varying naturally in a way similar to that of power demand.

For further generation optimization, fixed PV cells like rooftop solar can be installed at a variety of angles, resulting in different ideal power generation times. So in that way, the economics can result in installation optimized for peak hours.

[Starver]

Idea: Solar Wall along the Mexico/US border.  Doesn't need to block passage. That can be done by the electric fence that it powers, to keep the desperate immigrants from leaving the depravation, poverty and strife of Trumpland...

[PTTG??]

About time we got back to Trump.

I'm trying to figure out how to update Liberal Crime Squad for the new era. Give everyone smartphones?

[Arx]

why equatorial countries don't get in on this solar business. Countries in the tropics tend to be some of the most impoverished.

And there you have it. Capital outlay is prohibitive.

[Frumple]

Idea: Solar Wall along the Mexico/US border.  Doesn't need to block passage. That can be done by the electric fence that it powers, to keep the desperate immigrants from leaving the depravation, poverty and strife of Trumpland...

No, no. Not a solar wall. Or at least not just a solar wall. What we do is bicycles. On some sort of track that keeps em slow while putting a lot of the effort to use making energy. A miles long corridor with leg turned power generation. So they can come in as they please, but they've gotta' put out a good handful of Kw first.

[martinuzz]

You could call it the Green Mile

Makes me wonder though how human muscle power rates on the CO2 efficiency scale. I think burning coal or fossil fuel might actually be less polluting per kW produced. Our respiratory system is not terribly efficient.

[Frumple]

I could see trump unironically naming this hypothetical construct just that.

[Sergarr]

You could call it the Green Mile

That's too ambiguous, it could imply that it glows green and is actually a wall constructed out of leaking nuclear reactors

[Starver]

Our respiratory system is not terribly efficient.

It's probably a lot better than anything we can make that does the same thing in the same amount of space...  The designs have been honed over millenia, and the few obvious faults (food and air pipes splitting from the same junction, so that the semiautonomic control valves occasionally fail, for example) are provably of low significance.

The biggest improvement might be to employ a countercurrent system (air vs blood) to optimise gas transfer, much as (some?) gill systems work (or heat exchangers with energy crossing between media), and that airflow thus needs to be continuous (a superimposed counter-heart for airflow pumping?), but that'd mean leaping from one evolutionary mountain slope to another (not necessarily adjacent).

So perhaps we could re-engineer human lungs better, but that'd probably have to take that particular leap to make up for the inability to create quite so good a set of self-cleaning, self-repairing gas exchange membranes as we currently have in the more bellows-like constructs we currently use...

[Rolepgeek]

You could call it the Green Mile

Makes me wonder though how human muscle power rates on the CO2 efficiency scale. I think burning coal or fossil fuel might actually be less polluting per kW produced. Our respiratory system is not terribly efficient.

...What are you talking about?

Biological systems tend to hit around 80% efficiency, which is pretty damn good compared to everything else, it's just that not all of it goes directly into kinetic movement, since we maintain ourselves. The bond energy is gonna be the same basically no matter what. The only thing really relevant at that point is how much H₂O versus CO₂ is produced by the reaction. And honestly, CO₂ isn't that bad in terms of being a greenhouse gas. There's just so goddamn much of it currently that it piles up. But CO₂ gets taken up by plant life and cyanobacteria, whereas methane and the other pollutants that aren't purely about global warming do not. Chlorofluorocarbons, for example. Biological systems don't scale as well as mechanical systems, but they're significantly more efficient and self-sufficient.

[miauw62]

Also, the burning of fossil fuels releases all sorts of other nasty stuff that respiration doesn't.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

Also, people breathe regardless of whether they're a couch potato or an Olympian - how much extra respiration does exercise take, anyway?