Talk:Solar energy

Not sure about solar stirling engine because it could probably be used for various things and not just electricity.

The Needs
This section could be renamed but it is intended to provide a brief outline of current global electrical consumption and then to give a sample of about 10 different countries of varying sizes, their installed electrical capacity. No need to give an endless table.

Then it would be nice to create a table showing the area that would be needed to be covered in solar cells to produce this amount of power. It might be worth factoring in latitude in some way.

It would be best for this section now to get too big as it could end up overlapping with the section on electrical power generation and it would be better to have the discussion or text on the various cells types first before any extensive text on that.

State of the Solar Energy Industry
This could be added either as a new section, possibly after the section on electrical generation.

A subsection called

Potential Future Scenarios for Solar Energy
could cover some estimated production values and offsets to the use of fossil fuels for a range of growth rates. This could be in tabular form.

Topic namespace
Actually, the Topic: namespace is more for planning and listing learning resources for the main namespace (no prefix). Topic: pages are generally for "divisions", "departments", "centers" and such. Topic:Solar energy was sort of intended to be a sub-department of Topic:Renewable energy. I suggest moving the excellent content you've outlined here to a series of separate resources using the titles of the sections or similar. For example, learning resources titled something like Solar cell technology or Passive solar building design and things like that. See Naming conventions for some ideas. CQ 05:38, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

The Resource
surface area of a sphere is determined by 4πr2 not πr2