Desert Solar Calc
Desert Solar Calculation Whups, Terrestrial Solar Will Suffice Ted Bagg [Originally posted Sat 25 Sep '04 on PeakOil.com: http://peakoil.com/fortopic1698-0-asc-15.html . This calculation was suggested to me by the inventor Alvin Marks, ca . 1991.] After looking up a few values and doing some calculations I find that we don't really need to develop extraterrestrial solar collectors, ground-based ones can completely replace the power presently supplied by petroleum, many times over. (This is almost a shame; I had a nifty scheme sketched out for reflecting sunlight from a squad of robot-assembled archimedean-spiral parabolic mirrors above the Sun's polar regions to Earth's Lagrangian points, thence beaming power to the Moon along an unstable chain of stations in the Earth's orbit and connecting to Earth via geosynchronous satellites...) A. World Demand for Oil Expressed in Watts The average barrel of crude is less directly related ...