Can solar-electric power replace fossil fuels coal and petroleum?n what r the limits for solar-electric power?
General Add commentsCan solar-electric power replace fossil fuels coal and petroleum?n what r the limits for solar-electric power?
Not today. Only until fossil fuel runs out, which maybe in about 100 years. Presently the technology of solar-electric for large scale power generation is at it's infancy as photovoltaic requires more energy than what it can produce. This is when you count in the energy that is required to make the solar panels, the storage methods, the new grid, etc. and the energy that will be produced in the life time of the panels.
For USA the total percentage of other renewables is around 2.5% with photovoltaic being a smaller percentage of that even. It could be as low as 0.5%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity…
additional edit based on others response
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Let's say the answer that 3 Watts per square feet is correct. The we should be able to compute the land area required to generate enough electricity for USA.
From http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity… , we get the total electric power used for USA which is approx 300 TWh/month. Assuming that we can harvest 10 full hours of sunlight to generate power at 3 W/sq ft, then that would work out to be 360,000 sq miles of land required. The state of Texas has 262,000 sq miles and California has 156,000 sq miles for a total of 418,000 sq miles; which should do the trick. Of course the calculation can be off by a factor of 2, if there is not enough for 10 hours of sunlight per day. And we haven't even solved the problem of power storage for nighttime usage.
So based on the above calculations, it would NOT be possible for photovoltaic to act as the sole source of electric power generation. Not even by a long shot. This is a very interesting thinking exercise.
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Oops. My bad. I mis-calculated. That's 10 TWh/day. forgot to divide the month into days, and 10 hours of sunlight per day. This make it more reasonable result of 12,000 sq miles or twice the size of the State of Maryland. So it means it would be doable from a size standpoint. Anyone have any ideas on the cost to build this?
Also the storage can use Pumped Storage Hydroelectric systems (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-stor… ), but will need about a 5 TW systems or about 2500 times bigger than the largest system in use today (see http://www.dom.com/about/stations/hydro/… ), and it would cost $5 trillion dollars to build, assuming we can get the water.
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