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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (8982)	6/4/2009 11:53:30 AM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

It would be interesting to see if you could play with CO2 but in the end the energy has to come somewhere. There is no free lunch! You need an input of energy somewhere along the line to do that conversion. If we could come up with a better, direct way to crack H20 with solar directly there might be a possibility. Sadly the highest efficiency of the few, best plants is around 8% and typically less than 1% for all the rest. And that's before you pour more energy in to make a useful fuel out of the plant material! Currently state of the art production PV's are 20 times more efficient at converting the suns energy to electricity. Within about 20 years that number probably goes up to over 80 times. Rectenna