I wonder what Mr. Westinghouse would think about that?
Mr. Westinghouse and Mr. Tesla would say..
Posted on 02/14/2008 2:49:59 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
Under these assumptions, U.S. energy demand could be fulfilled with the following capacities: 2.9 terawatts (TW) of photovoltaic power going directly to the grid and another 7.5 TW dedicated to compressed-air storage; 2.3 TW of concentrated solar power plants; and 1.3 TW of distributed photovoltaic installations. Supply would be rounded out with 1 TW of wind farms, 0.2 TW of geothermal power plants and 0.25 TW of biomass-based production for fuels. The model includes 0.5 TW of geothermal heat pumps for direct building heating and cooling. The solar systems would require 165,000 square miles of land, still less than the suitable available area in the Southwest.
In 2100 this renewable portfolio could generate 100 percent of all U.S. electricity and more than 90 percent of total U.S. energy. In the spring and summer, the solar infrastructure would produce enough hydrogen to meet more than 90 percent of all transportation fuel demand and would replace the small natural gas supply used to aid compressed-air turbines. Adding 48 billion gallons of biofuel would cover the rest of transportation energy. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced 92 percent below 2005 levels.
So what’s the environmental impact of covering 165,000 square miles with solar photovoltaic panels, including digging big caverns in the ground for nighttime energy storage and servicing all this stuff? Unintended consequences and all that. People should figure out the answers to these (and more) questions before enacting any such thing.
Go nuclear fission (short term) and fusion (long term). Much like gasoline for autos, nothing can touch it for energy density.
A DC backbone?
I wonder what Mr. Westinghouse would think about that?
Bold. It’d put me out of business but I’d be dead anyway.
What would be the impact of every homeowner in America installing solar panels on their houses?
I’m just starting to think about doing this for myself.
Actually, HVDC lines are extensively used today.
I was surprised to learn in the article that the compressed air caverns would amount to less than 10% of the cavern space actually in use today to store natural gas.
A colleague of mine once calculated the temperature drop in the air hitting Eastern Europe if all of Western Europe’s energy needs were met with windmills. It wasn’t a trial drop (I don’t recall the actual amount). I wondered the same thing if that much solar insolation were collected in panels rather than by the ground. There would have to be some unintended consequence.
I thought DC was a very inefficient way to transfer energy?
And the environmentalists bitched about the dams on the rivers out west... When we start covering a significant portion of the land with solar panels??? Ha, never happen.
“Mr. Westinghouse would think about that”
Yea, I thought that DC had a very limited transmission distance. Edison believed that each neighborhood would have a DC power station.
I wonder what Mr. Westinghouse would think about that?
Mr. Westinghouse and Mr. Tesla would say..
Didn't know that and others also. Why and where is DC used - I mean I like my rv's DC system.
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“Mr. Tesla would say”
Silly boy you don’t need those awful wires.
The distance is limited by low voltage/high current you want for your house. You can transmit either AC or DC long distances if you do it at high voltage and low current. The difference is that until recently it was very inefficient to do the level conversion in DC, while you only needed a transformer to do it efficiently in AC.
Here’s a simple calculation
Households in US — 160 million
Homes in US — 100 million
Fraction of homes that are detached — 80% (I’m guessing here)
Average house size — 2,000 sq ft. (also SWAGing here)
Fraction of roof facing the right way (i.e., south to west) (another SWAG)
That’s ~4,500 square miles of useful roof in the entire US or less than 3% of what the authors are proposing to plop down in the SW US. And much of that roof lies in areas that don’t get much sun, so it’s probably equivalent to 1.5% or less of the area the area proposed for the SW solar plant (another SWAG).
Envelope backs are really useful.
University of Ottawa did a study on this back in ‘99, and said large scale Solar was UNFEASABLE because of the environmental effects of REFLECTIVE COOLING...
Funny, but you can’t seem to find it on Google now...
Oops...
Fraction of roof facing the right way (i.e., south to west) (another SWAG) — 50%
You get an “F” for not showing all your work Mr. POF.
Yikes! I did it again.
No —> It wasn’t a trial drop
Yes —>It wasn’t a trivial drop
I like bold plans, but it would be even bolder to distribute the solar collection to the rooftops across the country.
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