Good point. I've had discussions with friends about things like the Einstein-Slizard refrigeration and efficiency keeps coming up, and it's always a struggle to point out that we're trying to do things in an environment where there's tons of tropical and equatorial sunlight, and little or no access to electricity. Efficiency is not the primary factor when the energy source is free and unlimited.

Free yes, but not unlimited. It's not very dense, so you get area-limited depressingly quickly. That might not be a problem, depending on how much power you need.

That depends on how abysmal. It may be more effective to just build solar and wind farms to replace the power generated from existing natural gas.

The figure that stands out for me is according to this one fossil fuel animation on YouTube they calculate we are using 100 times the amount of carbon that exists in all living creatures on the face of the earth every year.

That's food for thought... Even if we used all the forests and all the sea life we still wouldn't have enough energy. So we really need to be eat more efficient than natural systems.

https://youtu.be/SD9yVca6hHI

> they calculate we are using 100 times the amount of carbon that exists in all living creatures on the face of the earth every year

This doesn't seem right. Estimates put total biomass at 500-600 billion tons of carbon, and annual biomass production at 100 billion tons of carbon. Meanwhile global carbon emissions from fossil fuels/industry are 35-40 billion tons per year.

There’s initial capital and maintenance, if a thing isn’t space or energy efficient it might be more expensive than existing methods.

>How much does abysmal efficiency matter...? Serious question.

Serious answer: Supplying sunlight isn't what's driving cost here.

The problem is that inefficient systems need to be large, and enlarging systems (even 'simple' ponds, etc) makes them more expensive.