Solar energy production does not require the massive factory level sites.
Sorry B-witch... That's a myth. It requires tremendous amounts of construction materials to build a solar power plant on a large scale basis.
jamesphogan.com
"What this means in real terms is that while there might not be any utility billing you for the fuel, an enormous amount of effort must be put into concentrating the energy to a usable degree, and this doesn't come free. Here are some figures for materials needed for the construction of a thousand megawatt (typical size for a large coal or nuclear plant) solar facility:
Aluminum 35,000 tons
Concrete 2,000,000 tons
Copper 7,500 tons
Steel 600,000 tons
Glass 75,000 tons
Chromium/titanium 1,500 tons
This is in the order of 1000 times the materials needed for a comparably rated nuke, spread over 50 to 100 square miles as opposed to something like 40 acres (a sixteenth of a square mile), with all the corresponding escalations in transportation and construction. All of these materials come from heavy, energy-hungry industries that produce large amounts of waste, a sizable proportion of it highly toxic.
And that's not the end of it. Normal power-industry practice is to design for peak ratings of several times the rated capacity of a plant, to allow for heavy-use periods and recharging storage systems. To compare like with like, we need to multiply the above figures by, say, 2.5 minimum for a solar facility capable of doing the same thing as what's meant when we say "a thousand megawatt nuke."
Current capacity of the USA is around 750 billion watts, which, multiplied by 2.5 gives 1.875 trillion watts for all-solar replacement. Based on the "Solar 2" demonstration at Barstow, California, which delivers 10MW for an outlay of $180M, this would require $33 trillion, equal to $118,000 per person or $472,000 for the average family--500 to 1000 times the cost of coal or nuclear (even with nuclear hiked by a factor of five as a result of political obstructionism). Your $200 per month utility bill just turned into $100,000. Still interested?"
Btw, if you wish to discuss this topic further, I would love to... But we should probably do it over here:
Subject 50614
Hawk |
