Quote:
Originally Posted by dyna mo
What makes it even more unfeasible is that solar is entirely inefficient as an energy producer. It converts at best 16% of the Sun's energy and that's on a good day and I say good DAY intentionally. ~12 hours of the day under ideal conditions it converts 16%, the remaining 50% of the day it sits idle. Not working. Now expand that year long, ~6 months of the year is cloudy, winter conditions 1/2 the year, so 1/2 the year and 1/2 the day you'll get a 16% effecient energy plant.
and my $50 trillion dollar comment above wasn't sarcastic, that's the LOW estimate to convert the nation's highways and biways to solar.
I'm not directing this at you, SK, just quoting your comment for a sounding board  . |
You left out a couple of things, Dyna.
Solar cell effeciency used to be about 2%, and were very expensive. Today, commercially available & affordable ones are at 16%, with high end ones passed 40%. The point is, Solar technology, is getting better and cheaper.
Next, your calculations are wrong and you started with wrong data. The solar cells they use are 18% efficient, not 16% efficient (2 points make a big difference on a large scale). There are 4 hours of peak daylight hours per day (4 x 365 = 1460 hours per year) as their site says. Their site goes on to say this:
Quote:
Sunpower offers a 230 Watt solar panel rated at 18.5% efficiency. Its surface area is 13.4 square feet. If we covered the entire 31,250.86 square miles of impervious surfaces with solar collection panels, we'd get:
((31,250.86 mi²) x (5280 ft / mi)²) / (13.4ft²/230W) =
((31,250.86 mi²) x (27,878,400 ft² / mi²)) / (13.4ft²/230W) =
(871,223,975,424 ft²) / (13.4ft²/230W) = 14,953,844,354,292 Watts or over 14.95 Billion Kilowatts
If we average only 4 hours of peak daylight hours (1460 hours per year), this gives us: 14.95 Billion Kilowatts x 1460 hours = 21,827 Billion Kilowatt-hours of electricity.
|
Now I'm fairly sure that getting that much coverage is impossible, however, it would make sense to me to cover at least some roads and highways with this product. Right now, roads are wasted as far as energy creation or conversion goes. If this can be done in a way that is cheap, reliable and safe, why not? Don't forget that if this works, it MAKES money. People like you and me who are not engineers discounting the idea is the wrong thing to do. If everything sounds good, why not test it out?
We desperately need to find alternative, clean, renewable sources of energy. We need it for the sake of our lives and future generations, and all of life itself. Coal and Oil are the worst possible places to get energy from, and we're smarter as a species to continue to suck the tit of big oil.