In my mind, solar energy creates wind by heating up the surface of the earth, which then heats up the air above it, which then moves around to even out the temperature differences.
Therefore I suspect that in the long run (10 years? 100 years?) solar energy will be more common than wind energy. Similar to how solid state drives are overtaking spinning drives.
What do you guys think?
Right now everybody is focused on getting to 100% carbon neutral. However, the question must be asked: why stop there and not go to something like 500 or even 1000% energy generation.
There will be plenty of things we can do with the excess energy. I think this will play out over the next few decades. Mass produced solar will go on any available surface just because we can. There are already some lower efficiency but potentially very cheap to produce solar systems based on e.g. organic materials that can be printed on flexible surfaces (i.e. not glass). Having that stuff put all over the place is going to make an impact.
Solar is already regularly creating surpluses regularly. It's a huge problem for energy providers because they have to shut down more expensive to manage production when that happens. Any time you see a wind mill not spinning, don't assume it is because it is broken and instead consider that there might be too much wind power temporarily.
A structural surplus will create supply of very cheap (often negatively priced even) energy. There are all sorts of valuable things we can do with that.
Most new capacity will either be new players (e.g. Tesla is planning to be a virtual power provider) in the market without a sunk investment legacy or existing players that compete on divesting/isolating their sunk investments the fastest. Either way, this pushes a lot more renewable energy in the market. That in turn accelerates the demise of more expensive things in the market. Including plants that are still under construction which were financed under the assumption that they would operate for a few decades at high price points for energy. I don't think that industry can afford a major drop in cost for renewables. Yet that seems exactly what might be happening.
https://www.rethinkx.com/implications Rethinkx published an interesting perspective on this recently. They point out that the financial incentives of new technology are making this happen much faster than many incumbent players have planned/hoped for. They are calling out a feasible date of decarbonizing 90% by 2035 using existing technology depending on how governments incentivize and stimulate scaling and deploying that. It's a very aggressive and provocative timeline. But the reasoning behind it has some merit. We can haggle about how far they are off but I doubt it will be measured in decades.
Carbon neutrality involves most of those things happening on a very large scale. Our current electricity demand is a small portion of that overall future demand.
The fact that they’re stored energy is what makes them particularly useful, though. If we were exclusively using solar directly then we’d need to store it ourselves, or build a global distribution grid to move energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s needed.
(extracting kinetic energy from the orbiting moon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation: “Although coal is known from most geologic periods, 90% of all coal beds were deposited in the Carboniferous and Permian periods”
That was 300 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Origin: “uranium is only naturally formed by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) in supernovae and neutron star mergers”
That happened 6,5 billion years ago.
Geothermal is about 50% radio-active decay and 50% left-overs from when earth was formed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget: “Earth's internal heat budget […] comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.”
The problem with wind is dealing with the huge uptick in energy coming down the pipeline during a major wind event. Last I checked, this was still not a solved problem but I haven't been keeping current like I used to.
So in practice they shut down some windmills during major wind events to protect the system. The other issue both wind and solar have is storage. Though we've seen substantial gains in battery storage in recent years, so there is good news but I don't know if we are really "there" yet.
They have a max amount of power they can generate per turbine anyway, and I would imagine that's designed around.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/how-do-wind-turbines-su...
The wind will blow whether you use its energy or not. You're not "more efficient" if you use solar instead of wind. You're just making use of energy at another place in the system where it would otherwise go unused.
More generally on the Wind/Solar question: They complement each other quite well. Most of the time when there's a lot of sun there isn't a lot of wind and vice versa. Therefore building up both reduces your needs for flexibility and storage compared to only using one. Also of course there's a bit of location dependance, there are places where wind works better and places where solar works better (sunny). But still in almost all places you can use both, but you probably want a different mixture depending on the location.
Then there's offshore, where there's a higher likelihood to be more consistently windy just generally.
This doesn't follow at all.
Even if solar was 100% efficient there would still be many cases where wind power would be preferred. Overcast days, night, and very high latitudes where seasonal effects means there are months where solar isn't very useful are just a few cases.