On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 09:49:45AM +0200, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
> >The electricity use of the US in 2000 was 3.8 trillion
> >kilowatt-hours. If I can do my math right, 44 billion of these
> >panels would re required at a cost of about 22 trillion dollars. If
> >we were to do this in 10 years, it would require more than the entire
> >federal budget each year.
> >
> >Not only that, but the footprint would be enormous. Each panel has
> >a footprint of about .63 meters squared. 44 billion would have a
> >footprint of about 30 billion square meters or 30,000 square km.
>
> A footprint of .63 meters squared isn't that much: you can fit several
> of those panels on the roof of your house.
Why are you talking about only 0.6 m^2? Dan's figure includes industrial
power use, so one way to estimate whether 3E10 m^2 is a lot is to
calculate the total roof area of all the buildings and houses in the
US. I don't have the data to do this, so instead if we divide 3E10 m^2
by about 3E8 US people, we get 100 m^2 per person. That's more than 150
of those 0.6 m^2 panels per person. Doesn't qualify as "isn't that much"
I would say.
> Admittedly, that solution is not going to work in areas with a lot of
> high-rise buildings, but to provide those areas with solar power, you
> could set up large fields of solar panels in uninhabited areas. IIRC,
> Arizona is mostly desert -- might as well make use of it.
The power transmission losses between Arizona and the rest of the US
could be quite large. Have you done a calculation? How many more panels
would be required to make up for the transmission losses?
> Your remark about "the entire federal budget" indicates that you expect the
> government to pay for it.
I think you misinterpret Dan. The federal budget is just a yardstick
(meterstick). He could have used the GDP, which is around $5E12. So it
would take the entire GDP of the US to be spent on solar panels for 4-5
years to change to pure solar. The point is, it is damn expensive!
> But why not let people themselves pay for a solar power installation
> in their house? Sure, it will cost several hundred dollars per
> household.
NO! $22 trillion divided by 1E8 households is $220,000 per household.
--
"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
