¶ Wind Power Sequence (3)
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Index Entry
Half of that 10 percent is always in the shadow or night side, which reduces to 5 percent the working area of the Earth’s surface where vegetation is impounding Sun energy from which humans can produce commercial alcohol or leave to nature’s further-ages-requiring fossil fuels production and storage in Earth’s crust. Though solar energy impoundment inventions are fascinating to the imagination, as we shall discover, the amount of energy that can be captured by any local Sun-reflecting or lensing devices is relatively insignificant. Even though one-half of Arizona were turned into a direct sunlight energy-converting mechanism, that source would be negligible in productivity as compared to other sources. The local solar power-capturing devices will not work at night or when there are clouds. In fact, they work only during a few hours daily when The Sun is at a favorable angle.
The area of the surface of a sphere is exactly four times the area of the sphere’s great-circle disc (as produced by a plane. cutting through the center of the sphere). The surface of a hemisphere is then, twice the area of the sphere’s great-circle plane. When we look at the full Moon, we are looking at a surface twice the area of the seemingly flat circular disc in the sky.
