I recently read an article in Spiegel,
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a famous german magazine, about some "desert electricity"project. Some scientists plan to generate a large portion of Europe's electricity in the Sahara, obviously with photovoltaic panels. They estimated that for the whole world's (!) electrical needs they needed a surface as large as Nordrhein-Westfalen (one of Germany's little states). They said that to transmit all that power to Europe all they needed was a HVDC line. This seems like a generic answer, without any facts or calculations, like "all you need for a warp drive are dilithium crystals". Also, about the hype with the electric cars. A Spiegel articcle said, that for an electric vehicle to be feasible, we need a battery with three times the capacity and three times less the cost. And, ok, let's say we make a working electric car. What will happen to other vessels, like trains, airplanes, ships, trucks, buses? All electric? With hydrogen? I'd like to see a main battle tank with batteries. I don't say of course that I have "a magic solution", as probably there isn't such a thing. I'm just a bit..sceptic.