(March 25, 2019 at 10:38 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: I'd love to see the source on that one. I've seen estimates that take conservative production numbers and check that against the EIA and conclude that we'd need arrays totaling the size of california, for example..particularly when they include cars and industrial use. Far less for electricity, ofc...far less even than the amount of land already leased out for fossil fuel production.
Solar arrays at that scale would be a disaster, but I've never seen anything that indicated that if we covered the entire continent (or at least our portion of it) in one giant array there just isn't enough solar energy.
I was a little skeptical of that as well, but the issue is a bit confusing. We would need about 21,000 square miles of panels to meet our current electricity needs. But that's not even close to our total energy needs. That's just for our electricity consumption. That's not enough to replace our gasoline consumption, our natural gas consumption, our jet fuel consumption, and whatnot. And I think that it also doesn't take manufacturing into account-- the energy needed to replace the coal burning factories that most of our consumer products are made with.
However, every bit of sunlight that hits the US is an awful lot of power. For example, if we could store all of the heat that is absorbed by a Walmart parking lot, then that Walmart would be able to heat itself through a large portion of the winter.
If the average American uses 82,000 kilowatts of primary energy per year, then my math says that I would need about one third of an acre of solar panels just for my own use if I used as much as the average American (I don't, not even close). So if my math is right, then we would need about 166,000 square miles of solar panels-- but we would still be consuming the products of coal power from China.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
