Bill Gates disses efficiency, “cute” solar, deployment — still doesn’t know how he got rich

[bananas]

2. He's gotten some bad advice from Nathan Myhrvold

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

An open letter to Steve Levitt
Filed under: Communicating Climate Reporting on climate — raypierre @ 29 October 2009

Dear Mr. Levitt,

<snip>

As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.

Let’s do the thought experiment of building a solar array to generate the entire world’s present electricity consumption, and see what the extra absorption of sunlight by the array does to climate.

<snip calculations>

That’s a square 231 kilometers on a side, or about the size of a single cell of a typical general circulation model grid box. If we put it on the globe, it looks like this:



So already you should be beginning to suspect that this is a pretty trivial part of the Earth’s surface, and maybe unlikely to have much of an effect on the overall absorbed sunlight. In fact, it’s only 0.01% of the Earth’s surface. The numbers I used to do this calculation can all be found in Wikipedia, or even in a good paperbound World Almanac.

But we should go further, and look at the actual amount of extra solar energy absorbed.

<snip>