its obviously about using a combination of energy sources ..... but you seem to be under the impression that it is only viable in areas with a lot of sunlight - yet solar is used in Finland (as the article I linked showed).
Finland has been looking seriously at solar for years: http://www.kolumbus.fi/solpros/reports/solar_roadmap_ENG.pdf
why would they do that if it was only of value in the sorts of places you mention?
Germany also has a considerable amount of investment in solar.
A large solar array situated in several of the US' rather expansive desert regions would provide substantial amounts of electricitySolar is great if you live in an area with adequate continuous sunlight, which isn't really that common. It requires a relatively large system to supply power for normal housing needs, and the up front cost is pretty astronimical for most of us. I wouldn't mind using it as a supplement, but I couldn't afford enough to power my house, and I live in a small house.
A large solar array situated in several of the US' rather expansive desert regions would provide substantial amounts of electricity
Impressive calculations. It must also be accounted for that there are now more advanced ways of creating solar cellsLet's calculate that out...
Something that has to be considered is a nuclear plant can cost almost twice it's construction costs and take upwards of two decades to decommission. Nuclear fuel is also ultimately a finite resource subject to the same geopolitical instability that shoots oil prices up. You also have the proliferation of nuclear material requiring resources to secure and protect.Nuclear still comes off much cheaper on start-up costs, but that was more comparable than I expected. Of course, this was just a rough estimate and there may be things I've left out or underestimated. Whether all the factories in the world that produce solar power panels could actually produce 1,393,400 hundred-watt panels in a reasonable amount of time, could be one bottleneck. That much demand might run costs thru the roof.
Impressive calculations. It must also be accounted for that there are now more advanced ways of creating solar cells
Startup Makes Cheap Solar Film Cells ... With an Inkjet Printer - Popular Mechanics
Something that has to be considered is a nuclear plant can cost almost twice it's construction costs and take upwards of two decades to decommission. Nuclear fuel is also ultimately a finite resource subject to the same geopolitical instability that shoots oil prices up. You also have the proliferation of nuclear material requiring resources to secure and protect.
Nuclear plants also consolidate our power generation facilities and make them vulnerable to attack or damage.
With solar, our maintenance is low, fuel cost is zero, facilities are spread out, and fuel supply is infinite.
I disagree. Nuclear is NOT the way to go. It's not solving a problem, only delaying the same problem we have now. We need to put everything we can move into solar power networks, it's the best long-term and cost-effective system.I agree that ultimately solar may be better than nuke. We might even get there in my lifetime. For now, though, we still need more nuke plants... and nuke plants costs would be lower (and construction far quicker) if there weren't so many unreasonable bureaucratic and NIMBY delays.
We are desperately in need of LOTS more power generation, and we needed it ten years ago.
Let's calculate that out...
Well, a 100 watt panel is about 1 square yard and costs around $600 last time I checked. Over the course of a year you will average about 10 hours of good sunlight per day in the "sun belt" states...that comes to 1 KW-hour per panel per day.
You can't jam them in edge-to-edge. They need to be angled, (or preferably on a sun-tracking pivot but that costs extra) and you need enough seperation that they don't shadow each other most of the day. Let's say 20 sq feet per panel for the sake of argument.
A square mile of these... 5280^2 = 27878400 sq feet, /20 sq' = 1,393,920 panels, producing 139.4 megawatts of power during daylight hours, or on average 1,394 Megawatt-hours of power per day. Sounds like a lot, don't it?
1,393,920 panels would cost 836.35 million dollars.
Now... unless you only want this to produce power during daylight hours, you'll need a battery bank. In my experience a battery bank is going to cost not less than $100 per 10 KW/hrs even if you go with the big batt's. (There are some out-of-the-box alternatives to batteries, but a buddy of mine might be patenting some of those ideas so I will refrain...) Let's say you need to store half the day's power generation in the battery bank... that's 1,394 MW/hrs, divided by 2 is 697 MW/h, which is also expressed as 697,000 KW/h. At a cost of $100 per 10 KW/h, your battery bank will cost about 7 million dollars.
Another thing you have to have is inverters to turn the DC power that solar panels produce to AC power. A good-quality 1000 watt inverter runs about $500.... let's say you get a "bulk discount" and hope that you can get sufficient inverter capacity for only $200 per KW.
139.4 MW continuous, equals 139,400 in KWs. At $200 per KW, your inverter capacity is going to cost almost 28 million dollars.
Now we're up to about 871 million dollars, for 1,394 MW/h output per day. That comes to a startup cost of $0.62 per watt-hour of daily production.
The good news is that maintenance should be relatively low, my best educated guess is probably about 5-10% of startup annually. That's around 43-86 million a year, not taking payroll cost into account at all.
Compared to nuclear plants: $13 billion for 2200 MW power supply per latest available data. I wasn't able to find info on annual maintenance costs. 2200 MW power for 24 hours a day is 52,800 MW/hrs per day.
The startup cost for a nuke plant is then 13 billion / 52,800,000,000,000 Watts-hrs, for a result of $0.25 per watt-hour of daily production.
Nuclear still comes off much cheaper on start-up costs, but that was more comparable than I expected. Of course, this was just a rough estimate and there may be things I've left out or underestimated. Whether all the factories in the world that produce solar power panels could actually produce 1,393,400 hundred-watt panels in a reasonable amount of time, could be one bottleneck. That much demand might run costs thru the roof.
Well that was an intresting exercise anyway. We might actually be closer to viable large-scale solar than I thought.
I agree that ultimately solar may be better than nuke. We might even get there in my lifetime. For now, though, we still need more nuke plants... and nuke plants costs would be lower (and construction far quicker) if there weren't so many unreasonable bureaucratic and NIMBY delays.
We are desperately in need of LOTS more power generation, and we needed it ten years ago.
tell that to the former residents of chernoybel. and if you need proof that accidents happen all the time look towards the gulf
thats not all the time, both would have been prevented by proper precautions
A large solar array situated in several of the US' rather expansive desert regions would provide substantial amounts of electricity
This is not one of my areas of expertise, but my understanding is that delivery is the problem.
This is not one of my areas of expertise, but my understanding is that delivery is the problem.
Consider summer, air conditioning would not be allowed after dark. Yes, we used to live like that, I remember it well, having only a whole house fan in the hallway that sucks air thru open windows.
And winters? the days are shorter, so get home earlier, stoke up the wood stove, bundle up in the sleeping bags, and shiver til dawn....
exactly they were caused by human error. humans will always make errors. the difference between a error with solar power and a error with nuclear. solar kills nobody nuclear kills a bunch of people leaves an area uninhabitable and causes genetic mutations.
The most viable "source" of energy is too often overlooked. NOT USING energy means not having to produce more energy.
We waste a considerable amount of it. Look up "architecture 2030". They propose new building codes that would make all new buildings energy efficient, thus reducing the need for more new power plants.
We did it for cars, why not do it for buildings?
Congress forced car makers to design them to burn cleaner, and the car makers were very successful. Not only are our new cars 90% cleaner, they get better fuel mileage. One of the technologies that helped accomplish this was OLD, existing, technology. The overdrive transmission is the major component that allows light trucks and the heavier cars to almost double their MPG. Overdrive had been around for decades, but it took an act of congress to get car makers to use them on all vehicles.
There are lots of old technologies that can help our buildings use less energy. Gots to wonder why we aren't using them.
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