How Many Solar Panels Would Be Needed to Power Earth?

[Cartographer]

The only issue with solar is, it supplies all of it's electricity during the day then falls to zero as soon as the sun goes down. It isn't feasible to transport the energy great distances, the step-up step-down method used with conventional power plants is a colossal waste and only tolerated because people complain so much when power plants are situated close to homes, and the low values generated by any given solar farm (forget individual houses/developments) aren't sufficient to step-up to the required levels anyway, so as soon as sun sets, you need another power source; given peak demand is usually post-18:00 and that is dark between Oct-Feb/Apr-Aug depending on where in the world you live. Work is ongoing looking into energy storage, it's still conceptual and small scale (read, 30+ years from implementation if ever) so the only solutions are:

Get people to stop using electricity between 18:00 and 05:30

Or

Have an alternate power supply available.

Now good luck getting a private company to agree to operate a power station network that only operates half the time and only ramps up to deal with a huge demand spike then quickly trails off to a trickle. They'll laugh in your face if you even suggest that as a viable business strategy, so it has to be government controlled.

Now, show me a politician with a hope of being elected who will nationalise the power sector in his/her country while implementing mandatory solar cell installation. I might even be tempted to vote for them.

 

[kurupt87]

It really is quite unacceptable that we aren't putting more effort into acquiring solar panels.

No it's not, what's unacceptable is that nuclear power, the REAL and only practical solution to ending fossil fuel use in the world, is stigmatized as though it's a legitimate danger to society despite being both the most cost effective and having pretty much the smallest environmental footprint of all forms of power generation.

If the entire Earth switched over the nuclear power then we would be out of fuel for it within 15 years. That's what my friend who has a degree in Environmental Science told me at any rate.

 

[Ukomba]

Well, that area looks to be about ~2 Trillion square feet and solar panels are about $10 per square foot so that would only be 20 Trillion dollars. Assuming shortages and speculation in materials like silver, titanium and others don't skyrocket the price. Not like trying to essentially cover the entire state of Washington in those materials would cause that.

 

[slacker2]

It really is quite unacceptable that we aren't putting more effort into acquiring solar panels.

Erm, yeah, no. Despite the large use of solar Panels, they aren't that efferent as most of the energy is converted into heat or the light is reflected. They still need a few decades of research to yield any potential. I would rather have Fusion over solar Panels tbh.

Fusion is also a few decades away. They've only just recently managed to get a fusion reaction to create more energy than it used just getting the process started and that was in lab conditions. I really doubt that fusion will actually be a viable power source anytime in the near future. Unless you meant fission?

You're probably thinking of the national ignition facility 1:1 milestone, but that's not an example of sustainable fusion. The 1:1 ratio involves the output energy and the combined energy of the laser beams as they hit the hydrogen pellet, which is a fraction of the total energy required to power the facility. I've heard that a minimum ratio of 5 to 1 is needed to achieve sustained fusion, and a lot more than that if you want a commercially viable power station, which is beyond the NIF's design specs or potential, even.

Fortunately, it does seem like commercial fusion power really is a few decades away this time, but it won't come from inertial confinement designs..

 

[CrystalShadow]

They still need a few decades of research to yield any potential. I would rather have Fusion over solar Panels tbh.

If you're talking "decades of research", sustainable fusion as a useful power source hasn't even been shown to be physically possible yet.

OT: What I'm concerned about is the current state of the silicon mining industry. Until we can be guaranteed conflict-free minerals, ie silicon, tungsten, wolfram, etc, that didn't all get mined by child-slaves to fund warlords in unstable countries, we cannot be guaranteed a sustainable solar-powered future. I also don't even know if the global reserve of silicon is even capable of supplying a project of that scale.

I really think we should hold off until we have reliable means to mass-produce graphene that don't involve scotch tape, in the meantime we should focus on reducing power needs to mitigate ecological impact, since that's something we can all do right now.

You do know what silicon is right? Might be able to pose questions about what can reasonably be refined, but silicon, in the form of silicon dioxide, is trivial to find.
Go to just about any beach on the planet, for one.

Silicon. - 7th most abundant element in the universe, makes up about 27% of the earth's crust, 2nd most abundant element on the planet.

Seriously, We really aren't going to run out of silicon.
At least, not before running out of lots of other things.
I mean, it's more than 5 times more abundant than iron.
And have you seen how much iron we use? It's everywhere.
Also, glass is made of silicon. Ever looked around at how much glass there is in the modern world?
A trillion solar panels would be a drop in ths ocean

However, the same can't be said for trace elements used to create semiconductors.

On the other hand, anyone that thinks nuclear fission is a viable alternative while posing questions about resources for solar panels...

Uranium is a limited resource. At present usage rates, existing stocks will be used up in 90 years. There are more sources than just those we know of, but the numbers are in line with fossil fuels.
Thorium reactors do somewhat better, but it's still fundamentally an open question how long nuclear power would be viable.

You might point out that a viable solar power system needs batteries, which don't last forever. Which is true, but the materials making up a battery are largely recyclable, and can be reprocessed intok new batteries.

Which do you think will become a problem first? solar + batteries? Or nuclear fuel supplies?
Fusion would at least be based on hydrogen, an element so common the likelyhood of using up the entire planet's supply of it is remote.
Fission on the other hand... Especially of Uranium... Is not that impressive, in terms of how much fuel there is to work with.
It certainly isn't a supply measured in millions of years, or even thousands.
At best, one measured in centuries.
Which was also something we could once say about oil, coal, and natural gas...

 

[Pinky's Brain]

Solar has two problems, it's not cheap enough yet even for peak loads and we can't store it long enough to provide most of the base load. If Solar gets cheap _enough_ then that will fix BOTH problems.

Long term low loss thermal storage isn't really expensive, throw some rocks in a thermal distribution medium, heat them up with electrical heaters and run steam turbines with them to regain your electricity. The problem is the round trip efficiency, if you want high efficiency you need a closed system which manages all the gasses in it. If you don't mind lower efficiency you can just put pebbles in a bath of some liquid medium and heat it to some high temperature and "add water" to run a steam turbine, much cheaper.

If solar gets cheap enough to eat the low round trip of the cheap option, well hope you weren't planning on running a nuclear plant cost efficiently. The scary thing about solar if you want to build a nuclear power plant which has to recoup cost in multiple decades is that it just keeps getting cheaper.

PS. I have a great idea for the liquid medium, tin. This seems to be an original idea, do not steal I guess there are some problems with it I'm not seeing. Seems to me to be pretty ideal, high thermal conductivity even when solidified, relatively cheap, doesn't decompose at relatively low temperatures like oil or molten salts. They would work too though, at lower efficiency (because lower temperature).

 

[CeeBod]

It's really depressing how the nuclear industry's lies have been swallowed so completely that almost everyone seems happy to trot out the lie that nuclear power is so wonderfully cost efficient that we shouldn't even look at these expensive renewable sources.

Nuclear power generation is hugely efficient in terms of operating costs whilst running at peak - and it's this bit that gets translated as "is cost-effective". The fact is that all nuclear power plants take time to spin up and to power down during which they are very inefficient. Depending on the model of plant, the actual efficient production cycle can be as little as 3% of the lifetime of a plant's operations. They need to be regularly taken down for preventitive maintenance, during which they produce no power - and these maintenance outages are regularly 2 weeks at a time. Any minor incident can lead to shut-downs that last for months, and every nuclear power plant ever built has had extensive down time due to incidents (mostly minor, and with no public safety implications, by the way - but costly!)

Set-up costs for nuclear power are larger than for any other form of power - that's why the UK are borrowing money from China for a new build nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C. It's currently estimated to cost £24.5billion for this 1 new build, and the cost estimates have been going up almost weekly, so it could end up much more expensive than that - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11893698/Hinkley-a-truly-major-national-scandal.html

Decommissioning costs for old nuclear power plants are astronomical - I worked on the decommissioning project at Magnox Berkeley for a time, and that place will be incurring costs (at a run rate peaking at around £100m per year and then down to half a million per year for the final stages) until at least 2083. It last generated power in 1989, meaning almost 100 years to shut down and clear the site after switching everything off - and there are some sites with even longer close-outs. The waste produced during its operational life will need safe storage and security for as long as it remains potentially hazardous - and given the fact that if Julius Caesar had had nuclear power, we'd still be managing his nuclear waste today, that's a hella long time!

Take all of the lifetime costs of nuclear power, including the build, decommissioning and waste management and compare them to the actual KWh that are produced, and Nuclear power is actual the least efficient method currently devised - it's not even close! The main reason for nuclear power was because nuclear research, and ready availabilty of uranium and plutonium was required for nuclear weapons. The headline efficiency was trumpetted to the public because having a civilian use in parallel helped sweeten the argument in favour of having the bomb. In a post cold-war world it's a travesty that the arguments for renewable power sources are still tainted by cold war propaganda.

 

[Laughing Man]

Set-up costs for nuclear power are larger than for any other form of power - that's why the UK are borrowing money from China for a new build nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C. It's currently estimated to cost £24.5billion for this 1 new build, and the cost estimates have been going up almost weekly, so it could end up much more expensive than that - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11893698/Hinkley-a-truly-major-national-scandal.html

Not the best example, especially given that the 3 ap1000 reactors being built in Cumbria will come out at £10billion, and once operational will produce as much power as Hinkley C. The UK also happens to be one of the most expensive countries on the planet for the construction of nuclear PPs.

Decommissioning costs for old nuclear power plants are astronomical - I worked on the decommissioning project at Magnox Berkeley for a time, and that place will be incurring costs (at a run rate peaking at around £100m per year and then down to half a million per year for the final stages) until at least 2083.

Wasn't this one of the first nuclear PP in this country and as such amongst the first to be decommissioned? That alone would mean that the infrastructure and process would all be new and as a result be more costly, besides the Magnox reactors are now defunct, replaced by much more efficient smaller reactors that produce less waste and require less decommissioning time. I won't say that it costs less because this is the UK after all so if their is way to overinflate a price the UK government will find a way

KWh that are produced, and Nuclear power is actual the least efficient method currently devised

This extensive report actually says otherwise.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/

 

[insanelich]

Photovoltaics are a stillborn technology, and anyone defending them is hopelessly deluded or has an agenda.

They're useless garbage that should have disappeared into history of useless ideas, as far as earth-based power generation goes.

Solar power is viable. Solar concentration towers look great, but they're mediocre at best. The other solar concentration techniques work far better.

All photovoltaics do is muddle the waters and make all solar power look as bad a solution as it is.

 

[insanelich]

It really is quite unacceptable that we aren't putting more effort into acquiring solar panels.

No it's not, what's unacceptable is that nuclear power, the REAL and only practical solution to ending fossil fuel use in the world, is stigmatized as though it's a legitimate danger to society despite being both the most cost effective and having pretty much the smallest environmental footprint of all forms of power generation.

If the entire Earth switched over the nuclear power then we would be out of fuel for it within 15 years. That's what my friend who has a degree in Environmental Science told me at any rate.

At the current rate of increase for humanity's power use?

Fuel for techniques we use now: 15 years sounds fair.

Techniques discovered during the last 50 years when building nuclear has been more or less stalled: We'd have fuel for 15000 years or so.

Our OLD plants are inefficient and unsafe. Getting them built with lowest-bidder shit results in plants that are a nightmare to maintain safely. It would need the government building them, with a focus on safety and efficiency and not immediate profit. That'll happen.

 

[Made in China]

Photovoltaics are a stillborn technology, and anyone defending them is hopelessly deluded or has an agenda.

They're useless garbage that should have disappeared into history of useless ideas, as far as earth-based power generation goes.

Solar power is viable. Solar concentration towers look great, but they're mediocre at best. The other solar concentration techniques work far better.

All photovoltaics do is muddle the waters and make all solar power look as bad a solution as it is.

Except that solar concentration towers take a whole lot of space - you need a pretty big field of mirrors surrounding each tower, and not only do you need to maintain the mirrors and refill the water, you'll also need to maintain the computer controlling the engines and the rotary engines themselves. Another problem is that it's temperature dependent - if you're working in a subzero environment, it becomes less efficient and might not even work. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but it strips the simplicity of a solar panel field.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

Photovoltaics are a stillborn technology, and anyone defending them is hopelessly deluded or has an agenda.

How much cheaper does it have to get to be born? Ten times we might be able to do in a decade, if it has to be cheaper than that we will need a little more time. The great strength of PV is it's massive potential for cost reduction, it will eventually come down to little more than glass cost (and we use much more glass now than what is purely necessary as a hermetic barrier).

I think we will get to the point where just a flat field of PV is the most cost effective way of harnessing solar power. No tracking, no concentration, no towers, just fields of solid state electronics.

 

[CeeBod]

This extensive report actually says otherwise.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/

This extensive report, produced by lobbyists on behalf of the Nuclear operators, surprisingly says that Nuclear power is teh awesome and really cheap, like really, really! In other news, PR outputs for most industries are not the place to look for unbiased information!

Here's a Forbes article on how the economics for US Nuclear Power just don't add up: http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2014/02/20/why-the-economics-dont-favor-nuclear-power-in-america/

Finland's Olkiluoto EPR plant (Unit 3), which started construction in 2005, was the first new build nuclear plant in 15 years. It's been massively delayed, is massively over budget, still hasn't started operations yet, and the Unit 4 plant at the same site, which was given the go-ahead in 2010 has since been cancelled - so Hinkley isn't just an exception.

Also one thing I haven't even mentioned is that we've barely scratched the surface when it comes to the long term storage of nuclear waste. Here's an IAEA report from 2003 that was produced in response to concerns that nobody seemed to be making progress on coming up with a viable long term storage repository http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/LTS-RW_web.pdf The Onkalo site in Finland is the furthest along the regulatory road to becoming operational, and is expected to be operational around 2020. A quick check on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository shows that all Nuclear countries are having difficulty with how to resolve this issue.

Incidentally, in the UK all of the costs associated with long term nuclear waste storage will be borne by the taxpayer, and all of the current decommissioning costs are borne by the taxpayer, not by the energy companies. I don't have first hand experience of whether it works the same in other Nuclear countries, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't. If new build nuclear power is going to be so wildly profitable (which the industry figures seem to suggest) then why are no private companies trying to get licenses to carry out new builds? - It's an entirely government-driven and subsidised industry, and the economics are so bad they make the banks' subprime mortgage fiasco look reasonable.

 

[renegade7]

You do know what silicon is right? Might be able to pose questions about what can reasonably be refined, but silicon, in the form of silicon dioxide, is trivial to find.
Go to just about any beach on the planet, for one.

Silicon. - 7th most abundant element in the universe, makes up about 27% of the earth's crust, 2nd most abundant element on the planet.

Seriously, We really aren't going to run out of silicon.
At least, not before running out of lots of other things.
I mean, it's more than 5 times more abundant than iron.
And have you seen how much iron we use? It's everywhere.
Also, glass is made of silicon. Ever looked around at how much glass there is in the modern world?
A trillion solar panels would be a drop in ths ocean

However, the same can't be said for trace elements used to create semiconductors.

Yea, I meant the other stuff. My bad.

On the other hand, anyone that thinks nuclear fission is a viable alternative while posing questions about resources for solar panels...

Uranium is a limited resource. At present usage rates, existing stocks will be used up in 90 years. There are more sources than just those we know of, but the numbers are in line with fossil fuels.
Thorium reactors do somewhat better, but it's still fundamentally an open question how long nuclear power would be viable.

It only needs to be viable for long enough that a renewable solution can be fully implemented. There's no way to know for sure when renewable sources will be able to fully replace non-renewables, it could be in a year or in 100 years, the sooner we get away from fossil fuels, the better. Nuclear power just makes for a very good transitional power source. Most likely, it would only need to be in place for a few decades to take up the slack while fossil fuels are phased out and replaced with renewable sources.

And while solar power is far better, it's still true that we'd be doing much more in terms of practical and environmental sustainability in the switch from fossil fuels to nuclear than we would in the switch from nuclear to solar. And transitioning to a full nuclear energy economy is something we can do right now with modern technology.

You might point out that a viable solar power system needs batteries, which don't last forever. Which is true, but the materials making up a battery are largely recyclable, and can be reprocessed intok new batteries.

It's not the quantity of batteries, it's their efficiency. Rechargeable batteries degrade over time, there are energy losses due to work done by charging them, and there is always going to be some leakage current. We also don't yet have the industrial infrastructure to recycle such vast quantities of batteries as a full solar solution would entail. Don't get me wrong, we certainly will at some point in the near future, but we also need to be mindful of what can be done right now with technology that's already here.

Which do you think will become a problem first? solar + batteries? Or nuclear fuel supplies?
Fusion would at least be based on hydrogen, an element so common the likelyhood of using up the entire planet's supply of it is remote.
Fission on the other hand... Especially of Uranium... Is not that impressive, in terms of how much fuel there is to work with.

Problem with fusion is that it would require a very particular type of hydrogen, namely dueterium and tritium isotopes. These are both very rare, see http://www.unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=135 where a tiny little bottle of deuterium oxide is selling for $15, roughly $1.50 per gram. And tritium is only made as a byproduct of fission.

It certainly isn't a supply measured in millions of years, or even thousands.
At best, one measured in centuries.
Which was also something we could once say about oil, coal, and natural gas...

Like I said, nuclear energy is a transitional solution, not a permanent one. And if we just use nuclear energy until we can harness graphene's semiconductor properties to make solar panels, we would need a fraction of the number of panels at a negligible proportion of the cost as the author of this article refers to.

 

[Cartographer]

The only issue with solar is, it supplies all of it's electricity during the day then falls to zero as soon as the sun goes down. It isn't feasible to transport the energy great distances, the step-up step-down method used with conventional power plants is a colossal waste and only tolerated because people complain so much when power plants are situated close to homes, and the low values generated by any given solar farm (forget individual houses/developments) aren't sufficient to step-up to the required levels anyway, so as soon as sun sets, you need another power source; given peak demand is usually post-18:00 and that is dark between Oct-Feb/Apr-Aug depending on where in the world you live. Work is ongoing looking into energy storage, it's still conceptual and small scale (read, 30+ years from implementation if ever) so the only solutions are:

Get people to stop using electricity between 18:00 and 05:30

Or

Have an alternate power supply available.

What about accumulators? Couldn't you just save energy up in those and release it during the night? It seems weird that energy storage technology would be underdeveloped in the large-scale when in the small scale we have quite a large variety of batteries, capacitors, and other such energy storage devices.

It may seem strange, but its the truth. How many lithium ion batteries do you imagine it'd take to power a kettle and a microwave? What about an induction hob and the power supply in your PC? Plus, any accumulators worth using by necessity have to have input from many sources, so you inevitably have to transport the energy over long distances leading to huge transport losses (like we have now). There is current research looking into solutions, but we're decades away from installing a bank of batteries in a house that store solar power for night-time (that's even if people put up with having them there, current rechargeables are quite frighteningly flammable)

In terms of power, really coal, oil, wood and the like are really just natural batteries themselves, in one way or another they accumulated their energy from the sun.

Another potential solution is to connect power Globally; it's never nighttime everywhere at the same time.

How do you get the power from the other side of the planet without huge losses due to the inherent resistance of the power lines?
We overcome the problem of remote power generation at the moment by stepping up the voltage to hundreds of thousands of volts accepting the losses and stepping down the depleted energy to usable levels. Even doing this you top out at something like 3000 miles maximum before it is simply infeasible (and once you're supplying multiple destinations those miles are very quickly eaten up). Solar doesn't generate enough power in one locale to allow for this though.

On top of this, given Russia was happy to turn off the gas supply to its neighbours, how do you guarantee that geopolitics don't leave your country reliant on a neighbour who you've fallen out with? How do you account for the west coasts of continents who have supplied power to the rest but lose out because there is nothing but ocean to the west of them?

It's absurd to imagine we will ever be reliant on one power source. A sensible future eliminates fossil fuels and has a mix of renewables (solar, wind, hydroelectric) backed up by fission and eventually fusion. It's the only viable option but money and convenience coincide to keep us guzzling gas, oil and coal while ignorance and fear keep us from nuclear.

Oh, and vested interests pay off politicians to cut subsidies to renewables and keep them down for a long as possible. Seriously, if as much was spent on solar, wind and hydro as was spent developing fracking we'd almost be rid of fossil fuels by now.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

It's not the quantity of batteries, it's their efficiency. Rechargeable batteries degrade over time, there are energy losses due to work done by charging them, and there is always going to be some leakage current. We also don't yet have the industrial infrastructure to recycle such vast quantities of batteries as a full solar solution would entail. Don't get me wrong, we certainly will at some point in the near future, but we also need to be mindful of what can be done right now with technology that's already here.

Given the time it takes to build a nuclear plant, designing a large scale recycling plant for a given battery chemistry is hardly an issue. It's just straightforward engineering, no real research necessary.

Being dependent on a single source for base load is not a problem, only the backups have to be diversified. That's another nice thing about thermal as backup storage, they use steam turbines to get the power out. You could design those turbines to be able to run gas or liquid fuel as well.

 

[Denamic]

It's not the quantity of batteries, it's their efficiency. Rechargeable batteries degrade over time, there are energy losses due to work done by charging them, and there is always going to be some leakage current. We also don't yet have the industrial infrastructure to recycle such vast quantities of batteries as a full solar solution would entail. Don't get me wrong, we certainly will at some point in the near future, but we also need to be mindful of what can be done right now with technology that's already here.

Given the time it takes to build a nuclear plant, designing a large scale recycling plant for a given battery chemistry is hardly an issue. It's just straightforward engineering, no real research necessary.

Being dependent on a single source for base load is not a problem, only the backups have to be diversified. That's another nice thing about thermal as backup storage, they use steam turbines to get the power out. You could design those turbines to be able to run gas or liquid fuel as well.

But doing that on a scale large enough would just increase pollution and costs. The amount of chemical waste and emissions produced would dwarf anything nuclear plants spits out. And nuclear waste is far easier to manage.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

Shrug, I wasn't suggesting battery storage any way. I was suggesting thermal storage.

 

[Laughing Man]

This extensive report, produced by lobbyists on behalf of the Nuclear operators, surprisingly says that Nuclear power is teh awesome and really cheap, like really, really! In other news, PR outputs for most industries are not the place to look for unbiased information!

That's fine I won't argue the point but it is all the same quite an extensive report, it provides actual comparative figures where as you provided figures with no actual reference, now perhaps the Forbes article you linked does this, and if it does that's great but it doesn't open in my browser so I can't really look in to it any further and further googling of the 'True Cost Of Nuclear Power' reveals the same articles, I.e ones that talk extensively about the initial investment costs, followed by the long term 'effects' of deal with the plant post decommission but very few actually seem to give a birth to death cost vs other power production.

Finland's Olkiluoto EPR plant (Unit 3), which started construction in 2005, was the first new build nuclear plant in 15 years. It's been massively delayed, is massively over budget, still hasn't started operations yet, and the Unit 4 plant at the same site, which was given the go-ahead in 2010 has since been cancelled - so Hinkley isn't just an exception.

Yet back in the 70's France managed to build 56NPPs in 15 years. So when the need is there the ability to do it more than possible. I would also be right in saying that the EPR Gen 3 reactor being built there is amongst the first four on the planet, so as with anything new I would expect delays and cost overruns, at least until the infrastructure to support mass production of facilities is established and the building kinks have been worked out. I would also be right in saying that the cost over runs of both the EPR Gen 3's being built in France and Finland 10.5billion Euro and 8.5billion Euro respectively still brings both of those plants in at a cost of less than the £24Billion being spent on Hinkley, a whole load less infact (so kinda emphasizing my point that Hinkley's cost was a poor example.)

Incidentally, in the UK all of the costs associated with long term nuclear waste storage will be borne by the taxpayer, and all of the current decommissioning costs are borne by the taxpayer, not by the energy companies. I don't have first hand experience of whether it works the same in other Nuclear countries, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't.

While that's a valid point it doesn't matter end of the day, if the power companies bore the cost then they would in turn pass it down to the consumer through higher power prices, doesn't matter if it's the government or the power company who pays for it end of the day we end up paying anyhow, all I know is that a country that uses 75% NP happens to have the 7th cheapest power bills in Europe (France) and that they make enough electricity that they now make quite a large sum of money from selling it to other countries. We are already paying a premium on our power bills for the implementation of renewable sources, in fact I remember reading earlier in the year about how the government was paying wind turbine owners NOT to produce electricity (though I would need to find the source on that one.) End of the day I would rather pay for an infrastructure that is powered 100% by NP, this way I know it's going to work rather than an infrastructure powered 100% by ANY renewable source, end of the day the wind stops, the sun doesn't shine then the power doesn't flow and I am afraid that is something I am NOT willing to pay for.

 

[Jadak]

I wonder if they've done any modeling as to the local environmental impact such giant reflective surface areas would have. They would definitely cause a difference in the local ambient heat cycle because more light would be reflected back from the panels than the comparatively matte ground, and given each suggested area is so huge, I can't help but imagine that could have an impact on local weather patterns.

To be fair, nobody is actually suggesting to build a single solar field the size of Spain, it's just an arbitrary unit of measurement being used for perspective.