Map of Middle East Oil (circa 1965)

Here comes the sun

Jun 20th 2024
The Economist

A photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon typically 182 millimetres on each side and about a fifth of a millimetre thick, with thin wires on the front and an electrical contact on the back. Shine light on it, and an electric potential—a voltage—will build up across the silicon: hence “photovoltaic”, or PV. Run a circuit between the front and the back, and in direct sunlight that potential can provide about seven watts of electric power.

This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to 72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels will provide power to family homes, to local electricity collectives, to specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost every other setting imaginable.

Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution nonetheless.

Over the course of 2023 the world’s solar cells, their panels currently covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600 terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a trillion watts). That represented about 6% of the electricity generated world wide, and just over 1% of the world’s primary-energy use. That last figure sounds fairly marginal, though rather less so when you consider that the fossil fuels which provide most of the world’s primary energy are much less efficient. More than half the primary energy in coal and oil ends up as waste heat, rather than electricity or forward motion.

BGP crew 8622

Carbon removal

We Need To Take CO2 Out Of The Sky

To keep below two degrees, we’ll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.

Ryan Orbuch
22 Feb 2020 • 19 min read

Work in Qatar 2010

Link: Mapped: The World’s Biggest Oil Discoveries Since 1868

Oil reserves

A sequence of unsafe acts but nice!

Geschiedenis van de Mijnbouwstraat 120

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