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Osiris30

Misinformed. Please see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11524691

and these links would be helpful

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/

http://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/02/base-load-power-is-a-myt...

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/08/08/rmi-blows-lid-baseload-p...

http://rameznaam.com/2016/01/31/how-far-can-renewables-go-pr...

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I'm not misinformed, you are looking for solutions for the current global energy production, I think we should increase it ten fold and that's only the beginning.

Solar power is great, but it will not flood the Sahara and the Simpson Desert, nor pump gigatons of C02 from the oceans or melt the oort asteroids into giant glass ball habitats for the billions of earth creatures that will live there one day. For that we need something a bit more energy dense. When the first commercial fusion reactor is sold, the vast majority of "renewable" installations will immediately become redundant.

The first commercial fusion reactor is (a) a long way off and (b) going to be tremendously expensive. Whereas solar and wind can be deployed today for reasonable prices, reducing our CO2 output.

I wouldn't be surprised if the first commercial fusion plant in the UK is built only after the 30 year design lifetime of my solar panels has passed.

Solar can do all of those things. The most useful thing to do with ort cloud objects is to get them closer to a star for cheap energy. Once you get the ball rolling it's easy to beam power out to the ort cloud.

PS: Remember there is no night in space. So that's 4 * (149,597,870,700) ^2 * 1.3kw for billions of years. After the stars die, then we can start using all that saved up hydrogen.

Sure, but you have to concede that it is much more convenient having a small sun in your basement than having to deal with concentrating the energy from the giant ball in the sky. Especially if your halfway to Alpha Centauri. In which case the giant ball is little more than a bright star.

But, I'll be happy with your scenario too.

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