One of the major problems with solar is that it’s diffuse. The second law of thermodynamics means that diffusing energy is very easy and concentrating it is effortful. When you take a bunch of photocells that are producing milliamps of current at about a volt (i.e. milliwatts of power), the process required to combine their output into a usable voltage and current is rather inefficient. I don’t have any recent data for how inefficient; does anyone?
Fossil energy is concentrated from the start. Nuclear energy isn’t; turning dilute ores into concentrated fuels takes a good deal of processing (but it still works more scalably than solar).
You can drown in a river that’s on average 1cm deep. The problem is a lot harden then simply producing 16x as much energy with renewables.
One of the major problems with solar is that it’s diffuse. The second law of thermodynamics means that diffusing energy is very easy and concentrating it is effortful. When you take a bunch of photocells that are producing milliamps of current at about a volt (i.e. milliwatts of power), the process required to combine their output into a usable voltage and current is rather inefficient. I don’t have any recent data for how inefficient; does anyone?
Fossil energy is concentrated from the start. Nuclear energy isn’t; turning dilute ores into concentrated fuels takes a good deal of processing (but it still works more scalably than solar).