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

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Fri Jan 18 10:10:01 UTC 2013


On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 01:08:32AM -0500, John Clark wrote:
> 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.
> >

John seems unable to post anything which is remotely right.
 
> 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

ICEs have a street efficiency of rougly 23%. Current EVs have
a combined fuel economy of e.g. 28 kWhr/100 miles. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

> watts to run the world's cars. As I said solar cells produce about 10 watts

How many whales would it take to run them on whale oil, John?

> 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

Why so many zeroes? I know you can use scientific notation, John.

> 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

Gee, you mean a car port with PVs is massive and expensive "storage and
distribution"? If I didn't know for sure you can think, I would suspect
you're pushing an agenda. It's not that they make any more dead dinos, you
know. 

Forget ancient sunlight bottled at terrible efficiency and extracted at
very high cost, get the real thing straight from the tap.

> 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.

Strangely enough, I agree! We need 3 TWp deployment rate annually for the
next 40 years, while we're currently at 30 GWp only. That's a factor of
100 short of what we need.



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