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Six6VI
Jason taught me that I have to end on a positive note, so here goes "nothing"
We have a lot of energy available here on Earth. The sunlight hitting Earth's surface contains 1,368 W/m2. Because Earth has such a large surface, that sums up to a lot of energy. "Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it!"
So why don't we use more of it?
www.businessinsider.com
What we need to invent is a method to extract that energy, more efficiently than using wind turbines, and more importantly we need to invent a way of storing that energy.
Many years ago, I was part of a project where we turned methanol into gasoline. The energy density for methanol is 22 MJ/kg. Gasoline contains about 47 MJ/kg. We did that by turning methanol into DME, and then turning DME into gasoline. You need to add energy to have that process work (because conservation of energy), but the rationale was that we could get that energy from the Sun. Also we used different tricks like lowering the activation energy of the reaction "using" catalysts.
It turned out that we didn't need that second step, turning DME into gasonline. One of my colleagues tried pouring DME into his lawn mover and it ran!
It was the top story on CNN. "Global energy crisis solved!". Since then the project was buried, mainly because of a patent, but also because burning gasoline (or DME) creates the dreaded CO2.
All in all it wasn't the best idea in the World, but it's ideas like that, that we need to invent, and when it comes to storing energy from the Sun, the possibilities are almost endless. Not all of them are feasible, but some might be.