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ossil carbon, it will get to be more expensive, and it will eventually be c heaper to generate electricity from sunlight. Using renewable energy to ele ctrolyse water to hydrogen (and oxygen) will then make more sense.
sunlight to generate electricity, and use that to split water to get hydrog en for later use in fuel cells. There are too many inefficiencies, too man y difficulties with storage, and too many better ways to achieve a similar effect.
bacteria to produce ethanol (or at least sugar) directly are the most promising direction at the moment.
They might be, if they captured ore of the energy from the sunlight absorbe d.
Photovoltaic cells get about an order of magnitude more energy out of each incident photon.
, high compatibility with existing usage (i.e., car engines), and can be us ed in fuel cells. Ethanol has many advantages over hydrogen here.
But you need a lot more land area to capture the same amount of energy.
rectly for charging batteries), then atomic power is a better choice in man y cases - it's the only technology that gives reliable continuous power gen eration with a high enough power-to-area ratio to compete with fossil fuels.
Atomic power might be a better choice if we ever work out a way of dealing with the waste from the nuclear plant. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of ma n, but we've been searching for a an acceptable solution for some fifty yea rs now and still haven't come up with anything that anybody has turned into a working repository that looks as if it might last the necessary thousand s of years.
And what's this "power-to-area" ratio? Solar power looks like a great way o f getting some use out of otherwise useless - and extensive - desert areas.