PV Gap

Johnny Said:

I have a state competition tommorrow and I need help on solar energy?

We Answered:

Well any green plant that is growing is storing solar energy. And you can release that energy by burning the plant.

Mildred Said:

Science Fair project for 8th Grade? possibly on solar energy?

We Answered:

These science fair sites might be able to help:

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/

http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/Resources/Gettin…

http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com…

http://www.ipl.org/div/projectguide/

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sci…

http://www.picadome.fcps.net/lab/sci_fai…

http://www.scienceproject.com/

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/projects/i…

http://www.freesciencefairproject.com/

http://www.hometrainingtools.com/article…

Patricia Said:

please help me get sites which guides to make projects on converting solar energy into light energy?

We Answered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_devic… panel
http://books.google.com/books?id=FJEuCAX…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltai…

Vernon Said:

WHERE WOULD YOU BUILD A SOLAR PLANT SITE!!! multimillion dollar solar energy project icarus?

We Answered:

The problem is that ideally, power should be generated close to where it's being used in order to avoid transmission losses and to avoid the high costs of building transmission lines to remote locations. Unfortunately, many solar and wind projects are in remote locations. With wind, a lot of effort goes into modeling long term weather patterns and superimposing the information onto maps that show power transmission lines, roads and property ownerships so that they can strategically negotiate for the land leases. I'd imagine that weather modeling will also be useful for siting a solar installation.

Andy Said:

Solar Energy................................…

We Answered:

The country and region are probably the ones you live.

She/he basically wants to know how much 'solar energy is produced vs. total energy produced (the demand for energy) and is asking for you to draw a conclusion whether or not it is worth it and to explain why.

Alternatively, I could say the teacher is basically trying to convince everyone, in a slightly subtle (I know, I do that too, but with much more style), that solar energy is crap and we should just burn more oil. Earth has infinity amounts of it, right? The thing is, just using raw 'produced of type a vs. demand' data is a deceiving maneuver. I will tell you straight ahead, regardless where you live, the amount of solar energy is not that high compared to overall energy usage. However, there are dozens of other factors, such as the limited amount of oil (primary energy source) on Earth while the Sun is for all purposes infinity (we will all die long before it expires), pollution and its impacts, technology is relatively new (compared to oil based technology, at least) and so it will necessarily be less efficient for now and new developments are too expensive, and others.

John Said:

Environmentalist even hate solar power "US Halts Solar Energy Projects Over Environment Fears?

We Answered:

Wind power doesn't kill birds. The towers are hundreds of feet high and the wind farms are cleared of undergrowth - there's nothing to attract birds to the site.

It's not about CO2 with these people. It's not even about pollution. It's about lifestyles. They prefer a David Kaczinsky lifestyle and it's not enough for them to live it, they need to impose it on us. They see humanity as a pox on the earth.


“If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it…” – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute.

“The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world”
– John Shuttleworth, founder of Mother Earth News.

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, Secretary General 1992 UN Earth Summit

“Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.” – Pentti Linkola

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. —David Foreman, Earth First!

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.
—Economist editorial

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.—David Foreman, Earth First!

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. —Earth First! Newsletter

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental”– David Foreman, founder of Earth First!

“If there is going to be electricity at all, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered”– Gar Smith

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States…”– Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.”
– John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state. - Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion -- guilt-free at last! -- Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets...Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. -- David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.—Carl Amery

Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby.—Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.—Lamont Cole

Cannibalism is a "radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation." -- Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

This is an anti-human, anti-progress, anti-civilization movement. The only thing that has changed is the pretext for their argument:

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling”, 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. —Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)