It doesn’t matter how many solar panels you install if you don’t simultaneously shut down coal and gas burners.
Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you’ve essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that’s enough.
The 100 gigawatt target for solar should not be a constraint. India won’t stop at 100 GW.
As a Virginian, I am proud of Dominion and SunEnergy1 for bringing utility scale solar to the state.
Energy legislation in Congress and the focus on energy legislation is first and foremost about creating good jobs. In Florida, where solar and biofuel and wind and so many other areas are important and so many in the private sector continues to pursue these, we need policies that will encourage that.
We have the capability – physically, technically – to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts. We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival.
I’ve always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.
We need to bring sustainable energy to every corner of the globe with technologies like solar energy mini-grids, solar powered lights, and wind turbines.
Wind developers have realised the importance of transparent method of price discovery, which was demonstrated in the solar sector. They realise that bidding brings in efficiency, and tariff is right-sized.
We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.
If we continue to develop our space program we can take solar energy and convert it to electrical energy by beaming it back to earth.
Whether it is salt farmers in India embracing solar power or wind companies creating tens of thousands of jobs in America, people are providing a vision for the clean energy future.
My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level.
I gained a first class degree in Physics at Imperial College London in 1968 and did research in solid state physics, but did not pursue meteorology matters until gaining an M.Sc. in astrophysics from Queen Mary College London in 1981, after which I investigated and attempted to construct theories of solar activity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?
Do environmentalists really believe that green progress means looking out at America’s majestic mountains, forests, green oceans, wilderness areas and deserts and viewing miles upon miles of nothing but windmills and solar paneling?
There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
Bringing solar as a renewable energy resource for those who are not able to install solar panels on their roofs allows more communities to benefit from a solar array.
Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.
I’m an advocate for a full spectrum of energy policy, but we’re never going to get there with solar cells that are going to power this country.
The Indian government has been taking some lead in several environmental initiatives, like the international solar alliance, many green initiatives in schools, lots of river reservations projects.
We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.
When the moon covers the sun, we have a solar eclipse. What do you call it when birds do that?
If you want to help Africa, you should help them out of poverty, not try to build solar cells and windmills.
Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun’s energy. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
Most people think of solar and wind as new energy sources. In fact, they are two of our oldest.
One of the most exciting opportunities created by renewable energy technologies like solar is the ability to help the world’s poorest develop faster – but more sustainably too.
Man is in a transition stage; he has 31 pairs of spinal nerves which keys him to the solar month, but the nerves in the so-called cauda-equina – literally horse-tail, at the end of our spinal cord, are still too undeveloped to act as avenues for the spiritual ray of the sun.
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it’s filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.
Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.
Of all the planets apart from Earth in our solar system, Mars is the most hospitable. Yeah. Right. Better keep my visit short. And yet, despite the discomfort, the danger, I love it here. I love coming back for these imaginary vacations. The sights are amazing.
When you look at Venus and the Earth, they formed at about the same place in the solar system. They’re made of about the same materials; they’re about the same size.
When we get out to other planets in the solar system, we’ll use the gravitational pull of each planet to help launch us to the next.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say its more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States.
I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that’s the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.
Solar makes electricity expensive for two inherently physical reasons. Sunlight is dilute, requiring 10 to 15 times as much materials and mining, and up to 5,000 times more land, than non-renewables. And sunlight is unreliable, which reduces the value of solar as it becomes a larger part of energy supplies.
Thanks to the social web, we can share and trade to use a whole universe of things we once had to buy ourselves. From cars to solar panels, people are realizing they can reap the benefits of ownership without the expense and hassle of buying.
Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators.
It’s very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there’s radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It’d be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
In days gone by, scientists would speak solemnly about our solar system’s ‘habitable zone’ – a theoretical region extending from Venus to Mars, but perhaps not encompassing either, where a planet would be the right temperature to have liquid water on its surface.
If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.
It is time to declare that the goal of the United States in space is the settlement of the solar system, from low Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars.
There’s a big difference between needs and requirements for grid-based electricity versus those for distributed rural homes or remote locations, or even rooftop solar, where photovoltaics do OK. The more economical a technology is, the faster we’ll see adoption.
To settle space, we will have to develop the ability to harvest and utilize the resources of the solar system, such as ores, ice, and the rays of the sun itself at levels of efficiency that will transform our relationship to our own planet Earth.
Since I work in home solar, I can’t resist focusing on the amazing developments happening here. What many homeowners don’t know is that they can have solar installed on their roofs without owning the panels or paying the high upfront costs.
The renewable industry claims technical innovations will improve solar and wind – but in reality nothing can change the lower power density of sunlight and wind.
Voyager found Saturn to be a planet with a complex interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. In its rings – a vast, gleaming disk of icy rubble – the mission recorded signs of the same physical mechanisms that were key in configuring the early solar system and similar disks of material around other stars.
