How much would it cost, and how much land would be need to get all the electricity in the US from Solar Power?
Im just curious as to if this is even possible. How much total power is used on average by the US? How much would it cost to make this many solar panels or other systems to make electricity from the sun? Im trying to figure out an estimate of how much it would cost to get all the electricity used in the us from solar power.
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15Watt 38in x 13in = 494sqIn Scale this up by a factor of 1 million
15Mega Watt = 494,000,000 sqin
494 000 000 square inch = 78.75 acre
Sofar 15Mega Watts from 1,000,000 panels needs 78.75 acres lets scale this up to equal SqMiles (640 acres = 1 sqMile) Note the area doesn’t consider additional room between the panels. You will need additional space so you can walk between them so as to be able to service them etc.
15 * (640/78.75)= 121.9 MegaWatts / SqMile
1000000 * (640/78.75) = 8126985 * $100each = $812,698,400
So far that is over $812 Billion and you have enough wattage to replace one nuclear power plant.
Your going to need more land than 1 sq mil, you will need additional hard ware to mount the panels.
So you can easily quadruple the cost and area requirements to $3.248 trillion(not counting the purchase of the land) on 4 square miles with 32,507,940 (32.5 million) solar panels
Why quadruple the cost? Remember that the panels are only exposed to 1/2 day worth of light so you need at least twice the capacity to store half of what you generate in batteries for night time use. And this is being generous in assuming that you get 100% efficiency and no cloudy days. The additional cost of batteries, wire , solar trackers etc are only partially covered in this estimate. Then you will have maintenance costs to keep the panels operating at peak performance and replace damage. (imagine what a hail storm would do)
And all of this to replace a single 120 mega watt power plant.
References :
http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_200263174_200263174
http://www.onlineconversion.com/area.htm
Comment by Mark G — @
According to this http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html the world usage of electricity is about 20 trillion kWh per year now. The same article says that the US share of world consumption was 21% in 2006, and slowly falling. So, let’s say we’re 20%. That’s 4 trillion kWh per year.
Let’s assume that we can get 2000 kWh out of every 1 kW of panels. That’s not unreasonable, as it’s less than the actual numbers for our system. We would then need 2 billion kW (4 trillion watts) of panels – about 100 times the total world production of photovoltaics today. There would be other calculations for a solar thermoelectric plant, but I’m unfamiliar with the numbers.
The cost of that many panels and the associated equipment would exceed our GDP today. It would be more than the simple $6/watt of a large commercial grid-tied system. With that much power, you would need a smart grid that not only transmits energy, but stores it as well.
References :
Comment by roderick_young — @