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To: Antonello
Hamsters on a treadmill are more efficient than solar.

Not sure what you mean by this. Hamsters may be considered as solar powered devices based on consumption of photosynthetically produced fuel. On what basis would they be compared to a solar cell? It seems to me that a solar cell provides about the most efficient imaginable conversion of the solar flux to electric power, on the basis of square footage of exposure. The hamsters require not only the agricultural square footage for their food ( in itself presumably much greater than the requirement for solar cells of equal output, ) but many ancillary fossil fuel based inputs, so that the net efficiency of a hypothetical hamster based electric power system would be, as one might suppose, ridiculously abysmal.

19 posted on 11/20/2011 10:59:58 PM PST by dr_lew
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To: dr_lew

I have absolutely nothing to back up my hamster statement, as it was intended merely as a facetious jab at solar power.

That said, current technology photovoltaic cells typically achieve a mere 12% efficiency rate, meaning it literally takes a ton of them (and a correspondingly large chunk of real estate, manpower, and energy-intensive manufacturing processes) to produce anything approaching viable amounts of energy.


24 posted on 11/20/2011 11:13:00 PM PST by Antonello (Oh my God, don't shoot the banana!)
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