Talk:Energy

Michel: Very realistic! Natural sunlight requires massive amounts of space, and low light levels means low yields. To get a feel for this, just look at the differences in yields for strawberrines between England and Australia, for example, in the Food page. So greenhouses would need to be very large to provide enough food for Mars, and survice the -69C temperatures. It takes a lot of energy to grow food. Photosynthesis is very inefficient, at about 2%. All the rest of the enrgy is required, but doesn't go into the food. If you don't spend the energy to grow food, then you will spend a lot of energy building extensive greenhouses, with low yields and many difficult thermal problems. It's a bit the inverse problem of solar power vs nuclear power ;-)

In other words, following our extensive energy cost discussion, it should be clear that natural sunlight is more expensive than nuclear energy in terms of construction on Mars, unless the greenhouses are made from some unreasonably cheap materials.

Mining and production are in the Colony line. For this early a colony, they are not that important. Later on they become more important, in particular as energy for fuel goes down. Mining is very low cost. Steel production is surprisingly low in energy terms. I refer you to the 'Embodied energy' page.

Rick: This page suggests that a huge amount of the energy is spent on growing plants / providing food. How realistic is this? Plants take massive amount of energy to grow, and we should plan to use natural sunlight for this purpose. We may wish to turn on grow lights during a 85% reduction in light during a huge dust storm, but dust storms that block this much light are very rare.

Also, the table showing how the energy is spent has zero for industry. Why not move some of the energy spent on food production into this category?

Things early industry might do are: create plastics, transform plastics into useful items, make bricks, concentrate metal ores, refine metals, run carbonyl reactors, etc.

"Consuments"

Should a different word be used other than consuments? Possibly consumers? Personally, I've never come across the term, but I'm also no expert in energy consuption! So I'm probably not the best person to judge ;-) -- Ioneill 03:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ian, yes you are perfectly right. There is no such word. I will change it to "consumers". This is from my German tongue, 'cos the equivalent singular German word is "Konsument". Thanks for the hint! -- Rfc 07:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hehe, no problem, was reading it over and over and although it sounded right I couldn't work it out. German isn't really that far from English ;-) Great content by the way --Ioneill 08:25, 14 December 2007 (UTC)