[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

[John Clark]

On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 4:56 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It
> could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels
>

In just 17 years? Hmm, let's see what it would take to run a 100 horsepower
motor 24 hours a day, that's about what a small compact car would have. 100
hp is equal to 75000 watts and solar cells produce about 10 watts per
square foot at peak solar around noon. But we want to run that motor
continuously so obviously we'll need some sort of energy storage device
that will probably cost more than the solar cells themselves, and we'll
need at least 4 times as many solar cells as we'd need at peak, a 300,000
watt system might do, that's 30,000 square feet of solar cells or a solid
square with a 173 foot edge. I didn't factor in clouds, I figured you'd
want to build it in the desert with few clouds and cheap land (I didn't
factor in transmission costs either). But of course if you build it there
environmentalists will scream bloody murder because the habitat of some
obscure desert lizard would be endangered and all those very dark solar
cells would be contributing to global warming.

Incidentally at the latest count there are 1,000,000,000 working cars on
this planet. I didn't try to calculate how many solar cells you'd need to
run a blast furnace at a steel mill, or a 747.

  John K Clark
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