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

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> >1. Nobody runs their car 24 hours per day.
>   2. Nobody runs the engine in their car at full power for more than a
>   few minutes per day. Cruising at highway speeds requires about 20 HP.
>

One gallon of gasoline produces 34.7 KWH. All the cars on Earth consume
30,000,000 gallons of gasoline per hour. So you need 1,040,000,000,000
watts to run the world's cars. As I said solar cells produce about 10 watts
per square foot but only at noon on a cloudless day, so you'd need a
installation that could produce at least 4 times that at peak or
4,160,000,000,000 watts or 416,000,000,000 square feet of solar cells and
that is a square 122 miles on edge. I haven't factored in the inefficiency
caused by the massive and very expensive energy storage and distribution
system that would be just as important and probably more complex and costly
than the solar cells themselves.

And forget about all the other things that need to run on energy, all that
is just to run cars. 99.9%? Seems like a lot to hope for in just 17 years.

  John K Clark
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