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RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 16, 2019

in #rsslog • 5 years ago

"...the team describes a device from $30 in equipment that is able to harvest enough energy from radiative cooling to power a LED."

That's a tiny amount of power for the price. It's also a terrible thing to advocate during the beginning of a Grand Solar Minimum. As insolation declines, the ROI from the process will decline, and every watt of energy harvested will make the global cooling worse.

Thanks!

5 years ago in #rsslog by
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     5 years ago 

    Thanks for the feedback! I agree with this:

    That's a tiny amount of power for the price.

    The article points out that it's something like 100 times less efficient than solar energy (which is already pretty low in efficiency). But it's a prototype. It remains to be seen how it progresses.

    w.r.t the device effecting temperatures, I guess it depends on where it is placed. If the energy that's harvested would otherwise be lost to space anyway, which is what typically happens with night time radiation, then it wouldn't have any effect on temperatures.