Reply To: turn heat into electricity
The Focus Fusion Society › Forums › After Fusion › By late next month, you'll have over four dozen husbands. › Reply To: turn heat into electricity
Warwickzapkitty wrote:
… But what if sufficiently abundant energy caused heat to be produced on earth faster than it could radiate off, shifting the overall temperature in and of itself? It’s not enough to say that greenhouse-gas-related climate change is mitigated…
But you are actually speaking of two different things and they have two different solutions. The Earth is actually a big spherical radiator that easily handles thermal inputs in the 122 petawatt range. This is closely balanced by solar input… more or less… and the planet stays habitable for us.
The article extrapolates to 10^17 W in 400 years, 10^18 W in 500 years.
Against that you have that heat radiation is a nonlinear increasing function of temperature.
I guess if you could localise the energy use, you could indeed put up towers into the atmosphere to conduct the heat upwards, but I’m not sure if that would work.