Image by Sebastian Ganso from Pixabay
I can’t stand it when people repost stuff on social media, or places like LinkedIn, and they didn’t do the math behind their statement.
Ok, you said 173,000 terawatts of sunlight hits the earth. Yay! You’re right on that one.
Now comes the tricky part.
Solar panels are only 25% efficient on average.
To collect that 173,000 terawatts it would take:
196 million square miles of modern panels with 25% efficiency.
The earth only has 59 million square miles of land mass, so it would be impossible, even if you could manufacture and place that many solar panels, you don’t have enough physical area to do so.
Now the slightly better part:
The whole of humanity today, uses about 20 terawatts of power per day.
if you truly were able to convert, 24x7, that 25% to actual electricity, based on the above equation, it would take an area of 150 x 150 miles (~22500 square miles) of panels to produce that much power.
In reality, because of night-time, weather, spacing between panels, storage losses, and transmission losses, the actual required area would be several times larger.
Based on those losses, it would take 772,000 square miles of solar panels.
To put that into perspective, it would take all the land in Texas and Alaska combined.
Let’s go further – it would cost:
1. Solar Panel Farms for 772,000 square miles: 50 to 100 trillion dollars.
2. Storage batteries: 48 to 96 trillion for one day’s storage.
3. Global transmission: 10 to 50 trillion dollars.
So, anywhere from 108 to 246 trillion dollars. 20% to 50% of the estimated 475 trillion net worth of the entire planet.
What does all of this mean?
Solar energy, is only a stepping stone in the continued process of needing more and more energy on earth.
In the end, it will be too expensive and too disruptive on the land mass and human existence.
Let's go to the park and fly a kite! Nope, it's a solar farm now.
Let's go to the beach, to the mountains, etc - Nope, they're all solar farms now.
We need to find something new. Black Holes? Cosmic Radiation? Solar Panels in space/orbit? Cold Fusion?
Time will tell.
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