Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.
As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.
Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!
It is not economical compared to alternatives that is why you have to have government to force people to do things. In many places such as Pakistan where solar power is not economical on paper is actually very successful in practice because it is actually profitable.
To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a week
Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.
Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.
As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.
Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!
> As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical.
Not if you include the cost of needed storage.
Yes It is. Even including batteries:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...
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That's going to drop a lot as sodium-ion batteries go into large-scale production.
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It is not economical compared to alternatives that is why you have to have government to force people to do things. In many places such as Pakistan where solar power is not economical on paper is actually very successful in practice because it is actually profitable.
To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a week
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.
Seems to have been developed in 2008 (continuing through 2017), which explains the "economical" framing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineerin...
At this point the Hard Problem is policy to get out of solar's way.
In some regions, but it would be great if it was economical in cloudy Seattle and not just the sunbelt
If only we could invent a solar-powered, self-replicating, carbon-stacking, habitat-building machine..
Not to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.
We can?
Yes, plant more trees!
That's what he was trying to imply