[ExI] EP and Peak oil.

aiguy at comcast.net aiguy at comcast.net
Wed Apr 2 16:18:33 UTC 2008


Keith said:
> 
> It isn't a large state, in fact it's ranked 47th out of 50 in area. 
> Still it's 22,608 sq km. From Wikipedia, "or 0.45 - 1.35 kWh/m²/day" 
> from sunlight for 15% efficient solar cells. Using the lower number, 
> that's 0.45 GWh/square km/day or 10,173 GWh/day, for a solar panel 
> that size or 3,713,364 GWh/year. 
> 
> "The U.S. used about 510 billion litres (138 billion gallons) of 
> gasoline in 2006." 100 stations out of 20,000 would pump about 2.25 
> billion liters. "Gasoline contains about 34.6 megajoules per 
> liter(MJ/l)" That's 88,230,000,000 MJ/year or since "1 MJ = 0.278 
> kWh" 24,527,940,000 kWh/year, or 24,528 GWh/year. At 50% conversion 
> efficiency electricity to liquid fuel, it takes about 50,000 GWh/year 
> to supply 100 gas stations. That's about 1% of the output of a NJ 
> sized solar panel. 
> 

What if we we to mount the solar farms in the center of the Great Lakes and bring the power
back with under water cables.

The lakes are big enough that they wouldn't be visible from shore and by distributing thm across
the lakes transmission loss due to distance could be minimized.

The average depth of the lakes is 500 ft. so they could be anchored on tethers  or on small interconnect platforms
whichever would be most stable and storm resistent.

I realize this adds to the cost of construction but when you consider that no real estate needs to be purchased.  No issues/lawsuits from 
eminent domain battles and angry homeowners who don' t want to have to see solar arrays from their back yards it 
might be a cost savings in the long run.

Because we share the Lakes with Canada we could even make it a joint venture between the two countries in
the spirit of international cooperation and to share expense.

Channels could be left open at various points for maintenance and to allow for navigation by boats and commercial vessels.

But I used to live near Lake Erie and was even out fishing at the 3 mile mark a few times and there's not that much traffic out there.
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