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Originally Posted by Lanny_MacDonald
As well, solar cells have improved to where they don't need bright sunny days to generate electicity.
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Solar cells always worked in lower sunlight, it also happens that they shockingly produce less power at those levels this is still true today, further more, they also do not have unlimited lifespans and do pose a problem in terms of disposal. Further more many large scale industrial solar generation plants do not use solar cells but mirrors to focus the sunlight on various liquids which are then used to power boilers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lanny_MacDonald
First of all, I don't think your calculations are correct. California, the 5th largest economy in the world, could have all if its present electrical energy needs met with a 10 square mile section of land, already identified by PG&E by the way, in Death Valley.
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The largest solar plant in the world only produces 354 MW and occupies 2.5 square miles of land, consisting of over 1,000,000 individual mirrors,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_E...rating_Systems
Even the newest propsed solar plant(i believe this is the PG&E plant you were referencing) will produce only 553 MW over a area of approximately 9.4 square miles.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...430085,00.html
The USA uses 4.064 trillion kWh of electricity per year(2006 est.)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electri...pa/epates.html
Now since these new plants aren't complete and haven't been put into operation yet we don't know what the total power production will be. You're welcome to try to find your own numbers but you're going to need a ton of these large scale solar plants to try and replace only the current electrical power usage of the US.
SEGS(first link) produced 11,000 million KWh of electricity between 1985-2001, however the plant wasn't fully completed til 91, so i think a fair estimate is about 1,000 million KWh per year. Based on those numbers you'd need roughly 4000 of those plants to cover the US electricity consumption and thats not counting converting any cars to electricity
However, the newer plants(link 2) use a less efficient design and cover significantly large areas over land(over twice as much) but are cheaper to manufacture.