251 comments on Review: How Can We Outlive Our Way of Life?
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Robert,
I agree with Nick that the wind value in the figure looks suspicious. The comparison should be between solar panels and plants alone since wind is sideways solar and can't be compared in the same way. Also, solar can use in places that are not going to be used for farming so the figure has a problem there as well. If we insist that solar is mainly going to be on rooftops so that the denominator is essentially zero, there is no comparison by this method. This trend to use surface area really comes from the issues with plants, but we see it coming out in nuclear industry FUD where hydro is attacked for the surface area of the resevoir without accounting for the enhansed use of land downstream owing to irrigation and flood control. We should be careful with these surface area comparisions. The comparision of the efficiency of using quantum conversion of sunlight to electricity vrs. photosyntetic carbon storage and thermal conversion is somewhat helpful but elsewhere it can be deceptive.
Chris
I agree.
I think the bottom line here is that limits to available acreage are very important for plant-based fuels, and unimportant to everything else (oil, solar, wind, nuclear, etc).
Yes. It's a silly comparison, and I think even the author knows it.
The central constraint for oil production and especially photovoltaics are capital investment costs.
For PV, acres are irrelevant, we have plenty of low-value land with sunshine.
Panels and transmission lines are central.