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Riesstiu IV
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I find that burning puppies and kitty cats to help run power generators is a good solution to high oil prices and unhealthy coal power plants.
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Riesstiu IV
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What about using spotted owls as batteries?
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VetLegion
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quote:
Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
what about places like Mali putting miles and miles of that stuff in the desert. sub saharan africa could power the entire continent, with their 364 sunny days a year. |
From what I heard, given current efficiency of the solar cell, they couldn't provide enough power for the world even if the entire planet surface was covered with them. I heard that said long ago, it would be cool if someone looked up the numbers and checked them.
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VetLegion
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Because it isn't true.
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Riesstiu IV
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I thought it stood for butt plug.
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DRoseDARs
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"My god, it's full of peas..."
Jul 2002
time: 21:17
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quote:
Originally posted by  Smiley
Data analysis time:
Data from US Dept of Energy: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0812.html
Current US generating capacity: 720,000,000 kilowatts
100 square miles of desert = 2,790,000,000 square feet.
A solar panel system would have to produce 0.25 kw per square foot.
However, current solar panel technology is only capable of producing 10% of that. So it would take 1,000 square miles of panels. Then there's that whole issue of transmission, and what to do at night. |
Thank you.
Now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the article stated 1,000sq miles, not 100sq miles. My bad, but the idea is still worth considering in an acedemic sense. Obviously, you wouldn't want to have all the solar panels in one spot as they'd be A) an easy target, B) prohibitively expensive to maintain, C) the EPA or whoever would never allow so much land in one place to be distrubed, and D) damn near impossible to transmit all that energy to the rest of the country (at least not until a microwave satellite system were deployed in orbit).
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Oerdin
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of Internet Music.
Sep 2001
time: 21:17
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quote:
Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Actually, PopSci had a figure a few years back that if 100 square miles of Nevadan desert near Las Vegas were covered in solar panels, it would provide for the electricity needs of the entire United States, so it is conceivable that doing that in Mali or elsewhere would be a boon for Africa. |
I don't believe that at all. The energy output per area of the solar panels just isn't that hot. It requires much more area then you're talking about. HERE is an article which says that in one week last January the US had a nation wide electrical output of around 81,000 gigawatt hours. It also says that demand is up and production can barely keep up with demand thus since supply is so tight we can estimate demand as being about equal to 81,000 gigawatt-hours times 52 weeks in a year. That's a yearly demand of 4,212,000 gigawatt hours for the US which I shall round to 4.2 million gigawatt-hours.
I had a hard time finding the output per area of a solar power station but I did find one manufacturer who was offering to construct a $4 million solar power station which covered 3,400 sq meters and produces 2,500,000 kWh/yr. Doing some math results in each solar power station producing 2.5 gigawatts per year and 1,680,000 of these solar power plants needed to produce one year of the nation's energy needs. Since each plant needs 3.4 sq km that is an area of 5,712,000 sq km needed to make this output.
Converting metric to imperial units results in3,549,272 square miles of solar panels being needed which is about the size of the entire US ! We haven't even got into the nasty chemicals found in solar panels, there short life span (meaning they'd have to be replaced often), how they have to be cleaned regularly to keep output high, how output various with the weather, or transmition loses.
Last edited by Oerdin on 27-04-2005 at 17:05
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26-04-2005 23:32
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