The U.S. can power the WORLD with solar panels!

[brainflame]

It would take some doing. But it could be done. And in one way or another it should be done. Because not only is human caused global warming a reality, but it is speeding up! We have more than enough useless desert areas in the U.S. to put solar panels where we could power the world. Just think of it. We could be the next Saudi Arabia of electricity. But transmitting that electricity around the world would be difficult. Maybe it could be done with transmitted radio waves as Tesla envisioned. Or maybe we could do it with MASERs bounced off satellites, but sent back toward earth in a diffuse manner. Where animals in the path of the beam wouldn't get cooked.

I will show you a picture of the U.S. and an area on it that shows the entire area compared to the U.S. it would take to power the world. Though keep in mind that they wouldn't all have to be in one spot. I will also show you another picture of the U.S. and the total area of solar panels it would take to power just the U.S. It shows a square area that is around 140 miles per side. Elon Musk thinks it could be done with a total area that is just 100 miles per side.

 

[Ug make hammer]

Practicality aside, I don't see the national interest in powering the world. Also the sun goes down sometimes.

 

[brainflame]

Practicality aside, I don't see the national interest in powering the world. Also the sun goes down sometimes.

How practical will it be when you're dead. Because if you are planning to live past the year 2050, that's what you will be. Also, the solar panel areas I showed includes enough power to power the world, or just the U.S., both day and night. And there are many ways to store excess energy.

 

[HIP56948]

I suspect there would be massive transmission problems also, what and how would it affect wildlife, birds etc...plus what about domestic and middle eastern terrorists? Would be an easy target. An attack would cripple most of the world. Just wondering...

 

[brainflame]

I suspect there would be massive transmission problems also, what and how would it affect wildlife, birds etc.

Well at the very least we could power the U.S. And I did bring up the point of not effecting wildlife. I was watching some TV show once where they were talking about one of those solar arrays that use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a small area at the top of a tower. Though you couldn't actually see the beams, they showed an area of the sky where these puffs of smoke kept appearing. What those puffs of smoke turned out to be were birds that flew into the path of those concentrated light beams and got fried.

 

[Ug make hammer]

How practical will it be when you're dead. Because if you are planning to live past the year 2050, that's what you will be. Also, the solar panel areas I showed includes enough power to power the world, or just the U.S., both day and night. And there are many ways to store excess energy.

I mean, what incentive is there for the US to provide such a huge amount of power, so cheaply it takes the emitting sources (and cow farts) right out of the equation world-wide? That would need to be hugely subsidized, plus nobody likes the entity grabbing a monopoly. Expect sabotage on your transmission lines.

Yeah, batteries suck. Other ways are not many. Why on Earth would you do this, when there are deserts elsewhere you could build, and you could have a loop of DC transmission so everyone gets some when the sun is on one or more of the big solar farms?

The New Mexico location is good for the East Coast evening peak, for instance.

 

[Ug make hammer]

I suspect there would be massive transmission problems also, what and how would it affect wildlife, birds etc...plus what about domestic and middle eastern terrorists? Would be an easy target. An attack would cripple most of the world. Just wondering...

We spend basically no time worrying about attacks on coal plants. Is that just 'security by obscurity' or is the grid really strong enough to have one or two taken out for weeks?

 

[HIP56948]

Ah..you're right. You did mention wildlife. There's company in the house and I'm trying to talk to them and post at the same time. They're talking about the weather as I post this.
Oh me...take me away....

 

[HIP56948]

We spend basically no time worrying about attacks on coal plants. Is that just 'security by obscurity' or is the grid really strong enough to have one or two taken out for weeks?

I was thinking about the transmission lines. Just wondering about the Having your eggs in one basket and all that. I don't know.

 

[EdwinWillers]

How practical will it be when you're dead. Because if you are planning to live past the year 2050, that's what you will be. Also, the solar panel areas I showed includes enough power to power the world, or just the U.S., both day and night. And there are many ways to store excess energy.

You forget the requisite infrastructure / space needed to support a solar farm. One cannot simply calculate the total acreage needed assuming 100% coverage by solar panels.

The largest solar farms in the US - Solar Star I & II in Southern Ca produce a combined 579 MW of energy and occupy a little over 3,212 acres. That's roughly 5.5 MW / Acre.

Best guesses as to how big a "global" solar farm would need to be are roughly 18 Terawatts (Source).

5.5 acres per MW comes to 5,500,000 acres per Terawatt or at total of 18 x 5.5M = ~100,000,000 acres required. This translates on your map to the following:

 

[Helix]

I'd guess that between solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear, we could cover our power needs.

 

[EdwinWillers]

The real issue however is how to transmit all that power.

18 TeraWatts (the rough amount of power the globe uses) at the highest voltage transmission line in the US (720,000 volts) translates to ~18,000,000 amperes.
18 TeraWatts at the highest voltage transmission line in the world (1,100,000 volts) translates to ~12,000,000 amperes.

The largest commercially available conductor is 2000 MCM Aluminum which can carry roughly 1,300 amps in open air (transmission line). But it's massive and heavy. Moreover, you'd need (order of magnitude numbers now) roughly 3,500 of them to transmit all that power (assuming 4 per phase), or ~2,300 of them at the ultra high voltage.

Then there's the issue of "voltage drop." Internal resistance of the wire itself - over a given length of wire - "drops" voltage (in the form of heat to the atmosphere). IOW, over a given distance, the voltage on the transmission line will diminish from the transmitted voltage to some lesser value - which is easily calculable - for instance, after about 4,000 miles the voltage would drop to roughly half what it was at the transmission point, and at about 8,000 miles it'd be zero - not even making it halfway around the earth.

So no, no single solar farm, regardless how big it is (really) is practical to powering the globe. You'd need thousands and thousends of smaller ones, like we're starting to do now, to make it remotely feasible.

 

[Noodlegawd]

How practical will it be when you're dead. Because if you are planning to live past the year 2050, that's what you will be. Also, the solar panel areas I showed includes enough power to power the world, or just the U.S., both day and night. And there are many ways to store excess energy.

You should tell the power companies your plan for storing all the energy. Apparently they think it will be really hard. Go straighten them out right away.

By the way, at current production rates, it will take more than 400 years to produce enough solar panels to provide 2/3 of the energy needed by the entire world.

I hope you're building your factory now.

 

[Ug make hammer]

The real issue however is how to transmit all that power.

18 TeraWatts (the rough amount of power the globe uses) at the highest voltage transmission line in the US (720,000 volts) translates to ~18,000,000 amperes.
18 TeraWatts at the highest voltage transmission line in the world (1,100,000 volts) translates to ~12,000,000 amperes.

The largest commercially available conductor is 2000 MCM Aluminum which can carry roughly 1,300 amps in open air (transmission line). But it's massive and heavy. Moreover, you'd need (order of magnitude numbers now) roughly 3,500 of them to transmit all that power (assuming 4 per phase), or ~2,300 of them at the ultra high voltage.

Then there's the issue of "voltage drop." Internal resistance of the wire itself - over a given length of wire - "drops" voltage (in the form of heat to the atmosphere). IOW, over a given distance, the voltage on the transmission line will diminish from the transmitted voltage to some lesser value - which is easily calculable - for instance, after about 4,000 miles the voltage would drop to roughly half what it was at the transmission point, and at about 8,000 miles it'd be zero - not even making it halfway around the earth.

So no, no single solar farm, regardless how big it is (really) is practical to powering the globe. You'd need thousands and thousends of smaller ones, like we're starting to do now, to make it remotely feasible.

Lots of useful info there. I thought the idea of phased power was to reduce losses from radiation. Losses "to the atmosphere" might be a different thing: a small amount of power probably does arc to towers and the ground. If "arc" is even the right term.

High voltage DC is all the thing now. There was a trade war (Edison v. Everyone) fought over DC versus AC, but I guess they hadn't considered such high voltages. DC is also good for keeping a widespread grid in sync.

 

[Ug make hammer]

You should tell the power companies your plan for storing all the energy. Apparently they think it will be really hard. Go straighten them out right away.

If any of us work for power companies, they should say so right away. I don't want to get suckered by Big Wire PR bots.

By the way, at current production rates, it will take more than 400 years to produce enough solar panels to provide 2/3 of the energy needed by the entire world.

I hope you're building your factory now.

"Current production rates" being a variable.

I think it's impractical (verging on crazy) to build all the panels in one place. Instead, we want as close as possible to distributed around the lines of the Tropics, to provide for outages and demand lag (or demand lead).

Yeah, the lines of the tropics. You get good enough exposure of the panels but without the seasonal outages which occur IN the tropics.

 

[EdwinWillers]

Lots of useful info there. I thought the idea of phased power was to reduce losses from radiation. Losses "to the atmosphere" might be a different thing: a small amount of power probably does arc to towers and the ground. If "arc" is even the right term.

High voltage DC is all the thing now. There was a trade war (Edison v. Everyone) fought over DC versus AC, but I guess they hadn't considered such high voltages. DC is also good for keeping a widespread grid in sync.

Power is power - simple Ohm's Law. Power (P) = Voltage (V) x Amperage (A). (Variant of the more common Voltage (V) = Amperage (A) x Resistance (R))

Transmission lines transmit very large amounts of power. The primary limiting factor however in transmitting such large amounts of power is Amperage - or the electrical current which passes through the transmission wires. Wires have resistance to current, which causes the wires to heat up when current is passed through them (and thereby some power is lost in the form of this heat). There are several ways to mitigate this heat loss - the first is increasing the size of the wire, larger wire has smaller resistance to current. But there's a practical and economic limit to how big your transmission wires can be. So the next method is to increase the voltage of transmission. Increase voltage, decrease amperage for constant power. The larger you increase the one, the smaller you can make the other.

For example, 1 Megawatt of Power = 1,000 volts x 1,000 amps.

Of course, the size of wire needed to carry 1,000 amps is rather large and expensive so per Ohm's Law you can up the voltage and reduce the amperage and still transmit the same amount of power:

1 Megawatt of Power = 10,000 volts x 100 amps. 100 amps needs much smaller wire. Or,
1 Megawatt of Power = 100,000 volts x 10 amps. 10 amps needs even smaller wire still.

And yes, I've heard about some areas shifting to UHV DC for transmission - resolves some issues with AC transmission and does have limited practical and economic application, but such applications are very limited in overall scope. It also has some significant disadvantages that prevent its use outside the limited scope of its advantages - most notably having to convert it from AC (how it's generated) and then back to AC (how it's actually used).

NOTE: Edison's losing the war over AC v. DC was inevitable as the practical implications of the above were - indeed ARE insurmountable practically and economically. We are not reverting to DC power anytime soon, irrespective of how many electric vehicles or DC power storage systems (e.g. batteries) we use.

 

[EdwinWillers]

I'd guess that between solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear, we could cover our power needs.

Here is an interesting article about how much energy we consume globally and how much energy some predict we'll need in the decades to come - assuming nothing catastrophic happens in the interim.

How Much Energy Will the World Need?

Any climate plan that doesn’t consider this question is bound to fail

www.anthropocenemagazine.org

 

[Helix]

Here is an interesting article about how much energy we consume globally and how much energy some predict we'll need in the decades to come - assuming nothing catastrophic happens in the interim.

How Much Energy Will the World Need?

Any climate plan that doesn’t consider this question is bound to fail

www.anthropocenemagazine.org

All the more reason to pursue the strategy that i suggested. If you try to provide all of that needed energy with oil and coal, there's no way to do it, and we'd seriously **** up the planet even more trying to do so.

 

[Noodlegawd]

You should tell the power companies your plan for storing all the energy. Apparently they think it will be really hard. You should go straighten them out right away.

If any of us work for power companies, they should say so right away. I don't want to get suckered by Big Wire PR bots.



"Current production rates" being a variable.

I think it's impractical (verging on crazy) to build all the panels in one place. Instead, we want as close as possible to distributed around the lines of the Tropics, to provide for outages and demand lag (or demand lead).

Yeah, the lines of the tropics. You get good enough exposure of the panels but without the seasonal outages which occur IN the tropics.

The only realistic solution to reaching zero emissions within the next 3 decades is to go hard nuclear. Ramping up solar, wind, and grid storage can certainly be a big part of the equation, but I doubt we'll get even halfway there without nuclear.

 

[EdwinWillers]

The real "game changer" will be fusion, once it becomes viable. And when it does, much of the renewables (solar, wind, hydro, etc.) will go by the way side in short order.

Both wind and solar are creating massive future ecological problems for the world - as are batteries (cars, storage, etc.). Phenomenal ecological problems.

 

[brainflame]

You forget the requisite infrastructure / space needed to support a solar farm. One cannot simply calculate the total acreage needed assuming 100% coverage by solar panels.

The largest solar farms in the US - Solar Star I & II in Southern Ca produce a combined 579 MW of energy and occupy a little over 3,212 acres. That's roughly 5.5 MW / Acre.

Best guesses as to how big a "global" solar farm would need to be are roughly 18 Terawatts (Source).

5.5 acres per MW comes to 5,500,000 acres per Terawatt or at total of 18 x 5.5M = ~100,000,000 acres required. This translates on your map to the following:

View attachment 67357437

I showed you the pictures. They show what areas would be needed for either powering the world or just the U.S. If you don't believe them, look them up for yourself. Also, as for the space needed, I wonder what area all the rooftops in the U.S. would add up to in area. Or what about paved roads. No reason why solar panels couldn't be put over many of them. And that amount of pavement is enough to pave over the state of West Virginia. All of this is without even touching any basically useless desert areas. Though we would still need a power distribution grid. To send power from places where it is sunny to places where it is cloudy. Though even on cloudy days you would still get some power from solar panels. The only problem with any of this is that there isn't any money to be made from free. Which is what the power from the sun is.

 

[Ug make hammer]

Power is power - simple Ohm's Law. Power (P) = Voltage (V) x Amperage (A). (Variant of the more common Voltage (V) = Amperage (A) x Resistance (R))

Yeah, OK.

 

[Ug make hammer]

I showed you the pictures. They show what areas would be needed for either powering the world or just the U.S. If you don't believe them, look them up for yourself.

Turns out it's some place in Chile. High altitude, never rains, low aerosols. Nearer to the equator than Arizona.

 

[brainflame]

I'd guess that between solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear, we could cover our power needs.

The whole point of my thread is that we only need solar for everything. Day and night. And powering our cars. And nuclear is just too dangerous. Things may not go bad with them often. But when they do there isn't enough money in the world to fix the problem. And they leave waste behind that could remain dangerous for longer than humans have even existed. And the "elephant's foot" at Chernobyl is expected to remain dangerous for about 4.5 billion years.

 

[brainflame]

The real issue however is how to transmit all that power.

18 TeraWatts (the rough amount of power the globe uses) at the highest voltage transmission line in the US (720,000 volts) translates to ~18,000,000 amperes.
18 TeraWatts at the highest voltage transmission line in the world (1,100,000 volts) translates to ~12,000,000 amperes.

The largest commercially available conductor is 2000 MCM Aluminum which can carry roughly 1,300 amps in open air (transmission line). But it's massive and heavy. Moreover, you'd need (order of magnitude numbers now) roughly 3,500 of them to transmit all that power (assuming 4 per phase), or ~2,300 of them at the ultra high voltage.

Then there's the issue of "voltage drop." Internal resistance of the wire itself - over a given length of wire - "drops" voltage (in the form of heat to the atmosphere). IOW, over a given distance, the voltage on the transmission line will diminish from the transmitted voltage to some lesser value - which is easily calculable - for instance, after about 4,000 miles the voltage would drop to roughly half what it was at the transmission point, and at about 8,000 miles it'd be zero - not even making it halfway around the earth.

So no, no single solar farm, regardless how big it is (really) is practical to powering the globe. You'd need thousands and thousends of smaller ones, like we're starting to do now, to make it remotely feasible.

Maybe Tesla was onto something when he wanted to transmit power wirelessly. And what about my idea of transmitting power by bouncing MASERs off satellites.