I Believe In Green Energy
I wanna talk about renewable energy for a second, specifically solar power. There's been a recent truism floating around about solar panels, claiming that they're not a viable option for producing electricity on a large scale because "they only operate at 18% efficiency." That statistic is true, but it's not the criticism people think it is. 18% efficiency is in actuality very high, but because most people don't know how "efficiency" is calculated when determining mass-energy equivalency, they think that it means solar panels are terribly ineffective.
Most methods of creating usable power involve converting mass into energy. All mass has energy (not all energy has mass though) and in order to harness that energy, you need to convert the mass. The three main ways of doing this are chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, and gravitational reactions. There's a fourth type, and that's antimatter, but we don't really talk about that as much because we haven't figured out how to harness the energy created by antimatter interactions, at least, not yet.
Any form of nonrenewable energy, including coal, oil, gasoline, petroleum, kerosene, propane, diesel, butane, and natural gas, are chemical reactions. And these reactions are so ridiculously bad at converting mass to energy that in my field of astronomy, we don't even count chemical reactions as a viable method of doing so. Chemical reactions convert [i]one billionth of one percent[/i] of the total mass involved in the reaction into energy. That means that fossil fuels operate at 0.000000001% efficiency. Suddenly, 18% doesn't seem like the abysmal data point that it did before.
So, why are solar panels so much more efficient? It's because there's no mass-energy conversion taking place. Light has no mass. Remember when I said that all mass possess energy but not all energy possesses mass? Light is an example of that. It has no mass. It does not take up space, it does not create a gravitational pull, it can pass through other sources of light without altering it. You couldn't, for example, fill a box with so much light that you couldn't fit any more inside. Wave-particle duality makes it clear that light IS carried by a particle, but like all force-carriers, it is a massless particle: the photon.
So solar panels don't require a method of converting mass to energy since light is already comprised solely of energy. All the solar panel has to do is harness it, and convert it into electricity. This process operates at about 18% efficiency, which means about 18% of all sunlight that contacts the panel over a set period of time is converted into usable power. It's extremely efficient, and does not produce emissions.
That being said, solar panels are expensive to produce and require the use of some substances which are difficult to obtain. So it's not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than chemical reactions like fossil fuels are.
Most methods of creating usable power involve converting mass into energy. All mass has energy (not all energy has mass though) and in order to harness that energy, you need to convert the mass. The three main ways of doing this are chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, and gravitational reactions. There's a fourth type, and that's antimatter, but we don't really talk about that as much because we haven't figured out how to harness the energy created by antimatter interactions, at least, not yet.
Any form of nonrenewable energy, including coal, oil, gasoline, petroleum, kerosene, propane, diesel, butane, and natural gas, are chemical reactions. And these reactions are so ridiculously bad at converting mass to energy that in my field of astronomy, we don't even count chemical reactions as a viable method of doing so. Chemical reactions convert [i]one billionth of one percent[/i] of the total mass involved in the reaction into energy. That means that fossil fuels operate at 0.000000001% efficiency. Suddenly, 18% doesn't seem like the abysmal data point that it did before.
So, why are solar panels so much more efficient? It's because there's no mass-energy conversion taking place. Light has no mass. Remember when I said that all mass possess energy but not all energy possesses mass? Light is an example of that. It has no mass. It does not take up space, it does not create a gravitational pull, it can pass through other sources of light without altering it. You couldn't, for example, fill a box with so much light that you couldn't fit any more inside. Wave-particle duality makes it clear that light IS carried by a particle, but like all force-carriers, it is a massless particle: the photon.
So solar panels don't require a method of converting mass to energy since light is already comprised solely of energy. All the solar panel has to do is harness it, and convert it into electricity. This process operates at about 18% efficiency, which means about 18% of all sunlight that contacts the panel over a set period of time is converted into usable power. It's extremely efficient, and does not produce emissions.
That being said, solar panels are expensive to produce and require the use of some substances which are difficult to obtain. So it's not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than chemical reactions like fossil fuels are.
26-30, F
