• Question: How can we get even more energy from the Sun?

    Asked by Chante to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 15 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Eleni Vikeli

      Eleni Vikeli answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Hi Chante,

      I don’t think we need to get more energy from the sun since the energy we are currently getting is far more than how much we are actually exploiting. So I think we need to find more ways to benefit from it!

      Eleni

    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 16 Nov 2016:

      Hi,

      As Eleni says, the sun already provides us with enough energy, we just don’t have the technology to harness it properly at the moment. To give you an idea, scientists think that in 30 years demand for electricity in the world will be 30 terawatts. The sun gives us 120,000 terawatts at any particular moment!

      At the moment only 1% of global energy comes from solar energy. Therefore in the future it will be really important to develop new solar panels that are more effective at capturing the suns energy and for more of us to use solar panels.

      Hannah

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 19 Nov 2016:

      Hi Chante,

      As the others have said, we already receive more than enough energy from the sun to power our entire planet for the foreseeable future! The biggest problem is harnessing that energy efficiently, though developing improved solar panels etc!

      There is something called a ‘Dyson Sphere’ though, which is a superstructure that completely surrounds a star, harnessing almost all of it’s energy. it’s currently just an idea, but it’s possible one day humanity might be capable of building one!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

      Steve

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