Frederick Bott
2 min readAug 17, 2022

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Put simply, only the Joules directly from solar can accounted for at the point of collection, because only those can we say convert directly to wealth which is independent of Earth, coming in from an external donated source, at no cost to Earth, therefore are wholly additional to the existing energy capital on Earth, so something we should be issuing money on, to ensure money continues to represent actual valuable physical product, whilst that product necessarily scales up. Also note that there is no loading effect on the sun, there is no way we can load the source that is the sun.

The Joules in wind, put there from the sun as you point out, are already doing something essential on Earth, before we take them back out to put to our human use. It does actually load the wind, when we take Joules out of it. So we can't say that those Joules come at no cost to Earth. We certainly can't claim they are additional to the energy capital of Earth, they were already on Earth.

We have to accept in general that markets prefer solar, the returns are far higher. The fundamental reason for this are as explained, it is unique to solar, though the markets are not interested in those details, they just know what gives the highest returns on outlays.

Further, when a single solar panel needs replaced, it is a far smaller outlay than replacement of a wind turbine, so solar overall is much easier to maintain indefinitely, given typical business cashflows.

If you yourself owned both a wind farm, and a solar farm, both backed by hydrogen, with no limitations of land, and had a need to scale up, would you choose to expand the solar, or the wind capacity?

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Frederick Bott
Frederick Bott

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