paleocon wrote: If I did all the math right, it would appear that this technology would take approximately 7,093.75 square miles to power 50 million homes. As a reference point the state of New Jersey is 7,400 square miles.
The way I did the math is:
50,000,000 homes in America (taken from WikiAnswers)
The California solar plant would power approximately 4400 homes
The German solar plant would require 200 soccer fields to power 2200 homes
The American plant would be approximately twice as large.
A soccer field is 2 Acres.
50,000,000 homes divided by 4400 = 22800 solar plants
22,800 solar plants times 200 soccer fields = 4,560,000 soccer fields
4,560,000 soccer fields times 2 acres = 9.12 million acres
9.12 million acres = 14,250 square miles or nearly twice the size of the state of New Jersey. (36,907.33 square kilometers)
That is far less space than Eyas estimated. Check my numbers and see if I made a calculation error. If my numbers are correct, that means the solar cells they are using for these projects are about two times more efficient than they used to be, assuming Eyas' numbers add up too.
Clearly this technology alone is not the solution. We can't cover half of Minnesota (although many people might not mind covering New Jersey) to provide power for homes.
I got roughly the same answer as you did & then I multiplied by roughly 3. Households use about 1/3 of the electricity that we use in the U.S.. Industrial facilities use much more, & commercial buildings use a little less.
Mine were back of the envelope (literally) calculations from different websites, & I don't remember where I got the household consumption vs. total consumption from.
I grew up in North Jersey, but don't mind paving North Jersey with solar panels. Southern New Jersey, especially the shore, I'd like to keep. Maybe we could pave Delaware instead -- nobody's using it anyway.
bedbug wrote:
I don't know how to include a web address in a post, my apologies.
I usually just highlight the website address at the top of the page, right-click, copy, & then paste in the message area. It works for me.
Also, I ran across an interesting table on Wikipedia that has the number of power plants of different kinds, and how much energy they produce:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States
It shows that nearly 1500 coal-fire boilers produce about 50% of our electricity, and only 104 Nuclear plants alone produce another 20%.
As for the other means of generation, only Natural Gas, and Hydroelectric produce a significant percentage.
So, let's see: Environuts don't like coal-fired plants, they won't let us build Nuclear plants, and they won't let us build Hydroelectric plants (the cleanest, best, renewable resource going). That leaves us with Natural Gas, although I'm sure the enviro-nitwits hate that too, because it generates that EVIL Carbon Dioxide.
I don't know what types of materials go into making the high-yield solar panels, but I'll bet you anything that I could find some horrific environmental impact even from solar panels if I looked into it.
Let's face it, we have NO Energy Crisis. We've got plenty of options, both for electricity generation and for transportation.
What we have is an Environmental Crisis -- that is, a crisis caused ENTIRELY by environmentalists, their lobby in Congress, and the legislations, regulations, and restrictions they've placed on us.
Death to Environmentalists. I'm sick of them.
Our new anti-enviro motto should be IMBY.
