Reply To: Climate, the science, politics, economics and anything else


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Graphene has been promising great things for a few years now. Sadly, no one can produce consistently pure graphene crystal structure sheets of any useful size yet except where it’s inordinately expensive at hundreds of thousands of dollars per gram. Silicon had issues that were overcome but graphene is required to be one molecule thick with a consistent crystal structure to do the magic it’s purported to do. We may well get there, there is a lot of investment, but we are not close yet.

Michael, you keep praising solar energy. I keep repeating that it doesn’t work at night and doesn’t work well unless there is good unclouded sunshine. It’s effectively useless in northern Europe for most of the year (when we need and use the most energy) whilst being relatively expensive in terms of actual monetary cost and in terms of manufacturing the panels, disposing of them when they reach end of life and in the rare earth metals used in them as dopants. I’ve also pointed out that currently solar (which includes solar thermal) provides 0.6% of the UK’s total energy requirement. You haven’t addressed any of those points.