The Solar Panel That Ain’t One
21 hours ago Guest Blogger
Kevin Kilty
Crises produce a lot of dubious effort to supposedly solve them. The long past energy crisis of the 1970s for example, the one that actually started as a utility crisis in the 1960s, caused many completely mad proposals for how to generate useful energy without using petroleum liquids. Limestone caverns filled with air during high pressure, let back out through a turbine when pressure is low; air foils propelled by wind around an elongated railroad track; magnets placed on automobile fuel lines to do something, never clearly explained, with the electrons in gasoline to improve mileage – that sort of stuff.
That 1960s-1970s crisis ended, I would argue, once we began burning coal in great quantities to generate electrical energy. We solved the crisis by simply substituting a plentiful fuel without having to adopt complicated schemes. Yet, those less-than-useful ideas live on and we see some of them today now proposed to solve the alleged CO2 crisis.
Unworkable schemes come in two flavors. The first involves schemes too mad capped to work because they have no principle of operation behind them or they violate how the universe works – they violate one of the laws of thermodynamics, for example. The second includes schemes that could work in principle, but could never be made to operate economically.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/22/the-solar-panel-that-aint-one/
