How many solar generating facilities for $60 Billion a year?

[darla]

Quite a few I suspect.



Pentagon is spending nearly $5 billion per month in Iraq and Afghanistan, a pace
that would bring yearly costs to almost $60 billion. Those expenses do not
include money being spent on rebuilding Iraq's electric grid, water supply and
other infrastructure, costs which had no parallel in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the last sustained war the nation fought, the United States spent
$111 billion during the eight years of the war, from 1964 to 1972. Adjusted for
inflation, that's more than $494 billion, an average of $61.8 billion per year,
or $5.15 billion per month.

President Bush announced Sunday that he will ask Congress for $87 billion for
U.S. operations next year in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere ? $66 billion for
military and intelligence efforts, $21 billion for reconstruction. Senior
administration officials said the request demonstrates that the president's
commitment to fighting terrorism would not be shaken by the growing financial
burden.

 

[Erdemal]

A few years back I saw figures of $6/Watt cost for grid-tied PV panels
installed on trackers for a utility scale project. PV panels cost pretty
much the same today as they did back then due to increased demand.

At that cost, $60 Billion will buy you 10 Billion Watts or 10 Gigawatts.
According to the PVWatts calculator, if this was installed in (or near)
Tucson Arizona then it should produce about 23.458 Billion kWh a year.

And what will you do with the US army? Send it on welfare? Not sure
they would accept 'peacefully'

This wouldn't power the entire country but it's more than a drop in the
bucket.

Erdy

 

[Atlas Bugged]

Quite a few I suspect.



Pentagon is spending nearly $5 billion per month in Iraq
and Afghanistan, a pace that would bring yearly costs to
almost $60 billion. Those expenses do not include money
being spent on rebuilding Iraq's electric grid, water
supply and other infrastructure, costs which had no
parallel in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the last sustained war the nation fought, the
United States spent $111 billion during the eight years of
the war, from 1964 to 1972. Adjusted for inflation, that's
more than $494 billion, an average of $61.8 billion per
year, or $5.15 billion per month.

Sounds like Iraq is a bargain then

 

[SammyG]

On a History/TLC or whatever documentary they showed the FedEx facility in CA
and talked about its extreme use of PV. They also said a solar array 10 miles X
10 miles would be sufficient to power the nation.

That's 100 square miles, or 2 sq.mi per state. Obviously from a distribution
standpoint, geographic, and redundancy concerns, you don't want all your eggs in
one basket.

Has anyone (in or out of Congress) seriously considered building the first
square mile? Maybe by the time the last one was finished, they could start on
refurbishing the first one?

Is that a viable project?
What the heck would a square mile of PV cost?
Are there any white papers on the subject?

 

[Eeyore]

On a History/TLC or whatever documentary they showed the FedEx facility in CA
and talked about its extreme use of PV. They also said a solar array 10 miles X
10 miles would be sufficient to power the nation.

Pure nonsenmse.

TV has become an extremely unreliable source of info. That's becasue it's made by
idiots who have no knowledge of or interest in science. A simple 'back of the
envelope' calculation would have shown how absurd it is.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

Let's take a look at the hypothesis that 100 mi2 of PV is enough to
"power the nation":

100 mi2 is 2.6 x 10^8 m2 (square meters)

Assuming all 100 square miles are in full sun, and are somehow on
trackers, and are somehow avoiding shadowing when the sun is not
straight overhead (which it never is, anywhere in the U.S.), insolation
is 1 kW/m2. Let's assume a conversion efficiency of 15%, which is
fairly optimistic.

2.6 x 10^8 m2 x 1kW/m2 x 15% = 3.9 x 10^7 kW = 39 gW

Frankly, I am dubious that you can run the entire country on 39 gW.

If I'm reading this EIA page
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) correctly,
over 4 x 10^6 gWH were generated in the U.S. in 2006. That's 4 MILLION
gigawatt-hours. That's an AVERAGE power generation rate of 456 gW.

That's over 10 times the PEAK rate that your hypothetical humongous
array could generate. So you're going to need over 1000 mi2 (not 100)
just to meet the PEAK rate. And you're actually going to need at least
4 times that area, to meet the peak demand, and to generate energy
needed to be stored for nights and cloudy days, and to deal with
shading. So now we're talking over 4,000 square miles, at an absolute
minimum.

And at $600 per 1 m2 panel those 4,000 sq mi would cost 6000 TRILLION dollars to cover
with PV panels.

That's 462 times the annual US GDP !

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

I think they said we'd need a collector that is 100 or 150 miles on a side.

Not even remotely close.

Graham

 

[[email protected]]

If we can ever get rid of "W", maybe some of the government money will
STOP going to the oil companies and start going to solar.

Where is this guy's brain? On the moon?

We still subsidize oil companies that are making 18 Billion dollars a
quarter. They don't NEED subsidies!!!

Wake up and vote for a party OTHER than republican next time and, just
maybe, we will see the research dollars going in the right places to
help save this country (if that is still possible???).

Mike

On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:12:23 GMT, in alt.solar.photovoltaic

 

[Eeyore]

The January 2008 issue of Scientific American discusses a project of
this nature. The plan proposed required 30,000 sq miles however.
It's interesting reading but requires improvements in the available
technology to be feasable. The hard part would be getting
the political will to make it happen. Sigh.....

The hard part would be finding the money !

Even with Nanosolar panels @ $100 per m2, it would require 30,000 x(1.6 x 1.6)
convert sq mi to sq km x 1million (number of panels pr sq km) panels x $100.

That's 7.68 trillion dollars over half the entire annual GDP of the USA. Add in the
other bits required and I imagine it would account for one whole year's GDP.

Never mind the timescales involved of course.

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

If we can ever get rid of "W", maybe some of the government money will
STOP going to the oil companies and start going to solar.

Where is this guy's brain? On the moon?

We still subsidize oil companies that are making 18 Billion dollars a
quarter. They don't NEED subsidies!!!

Wake up and vote for a party OTHER than republican next time and, just
maybe, we will see the research dollars going in the right places to
help save this country (if that is still possible???).

And what 'right places' would those be ?

Graham

 

[Erdemal]

The hard part would be finding the money !

Even with Nanosolar panels @ $100 per m2, it would require 30,000 x(1.6 x 1.6)
convert sq mi to sq km x 1million (number of panels pr sq km) panels x $100.

That's 7.68 trillion dollars over half the entire annual GDP of the USA. Add in the
other bits required and I imagine it would account for one whole year's GDP.

Exactly! $7.68 trillion for 76.8 billion square meter of PV at $100/m2
This will produce, in good US locations, 350 kWh/m2.year = 26.88 trillion kWh
The *total_US_electricity* consumption in 2005 was 4 trillon kWh (1).
These *30000_square_miles* would produce *seven_time* the total current
US electricity needs and probably *ALL_current_US_energy_needs*.

If you finance it on ?20 years? -~$500 billion a year: 4% of US GDP-, it
will cost much less than what oil imports cost, moreover it's internal
business. And, with little maintenance, it would provide *USA_cheap_energy*
for the next *100_years*.

The Nanosolar $100/m2 is a promise, not a reality, for now the best
price is $400/m2.

My ?*guess*? is that if $500 billions were spent each year on producing
current 15% efficiency amorphous silicon PV, the price would probably
go well below the $100 per square meter.

A ?third? of that size -10000 square miles- should be enough in
the median term.

It should have been started yesterday!

------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're afraid by the size and the numbers, look at numbers for
oil, gaz and coal:

The 500 300+ meter long oil tankers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_(ship)
plus thousands of others.

In Germany a single coal mine covers 85 square kilometer
http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=f...1,6.502876&spn=0.160411,0.31311&t=h&z=12&om=1
There are probably much bigger ones in ?Kentucky/Ohio/Tennesse?

The 100,000 gas station in the USA.

1 billion ton of coal are burned in the USA each year, it's
the equivalent of 25 million 40 tons truck.

 

[Mauried]

Exactly! $7.68 trillion for 76.8 billion square meter of PV at $100/m2
This will produce, in good US locations, 350 kWh/m2.year = 26.88 trillion kWh
The *total_US_electricity* consumption in 2005 was 4 trillon kWh (1).
These *30000_square_miles* would produce *seven_time* the total current
US electricity needs and probably *ALL_current_US_energy_needs*.

If you finance it on ?20 years? -~$500 billion a year: 4% of US GDP-, it
will cost much less than what oil imports cost, moreover it's internal
business. And, with little maintenance, it would provide *USA_cheap_energy*
for the next *100_years*.

The Nanosolar $100/m2 is a promise, not a reality, for now the best
price is $400/m2.

My ?*guess*? is that if $500 billions were spent each year on producing
current 15% efficiency amorphous silicon PV, the price would probably
go well below the $100 per square meter.

A ?third? of that size -10000 square miles- should be enough in
the median term.

It should have been started yesterday!

------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're afraid by the size and the numbers, look at numbers for
oil, gaz and coal:

The 500 300+ meter long oil tankers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_(ship)
plus thousands of others.

In Germany a single coal mine covers 85 square kilometer
http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=f...1,6.502876&spn=0.160411,0.31311&t=h&z=12&om=1
There are probably much bigger ones in ?Kentucky/Ohio/Tennesse?

The 100,000 gas station in the USA.

1 billion ton of coal are burned in the USA each year, it's
the equivalent of 25 million 40 tons truck.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Erdy

(1) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html#Econ

You still have to make power at night and on cloudy days so you need
to address the costs and the technology for doing this as well.
Storing very large amounts of energy is just as expensive as using PV
to make it ,as all the current forms need to convert the energy into
some other form and then convert it back,and this cant be done with
100% efficiency.
At best you can get 70% with pumped hydro assuming the dam is located
right next to the generating source and you dont have to incurr
transmission line losses.

Most of the plans Ive seen to make all a nations energy using PV never
address the storage issue, other than to say that somehow it would be
done,.
How much does it cost to store 1000 GWH for 24 hours.

 

[Eeyore]

If you finance it on ?20 years? -~$500 billion a year: 4% of US GDP-, it
will cost much less than what oil imports cost, moreover it's internal
business. And, with little maintenance, it would provide *USA_cheap_energy*
for the next *100_years*.

Not even existing higher cost silicon PV solar cells maintain their output for 100 years !

The Nanosolar cells are an unknown in this respect.but are not likely to be any better.

Graham

 

[Erdemal]

How much does it cost to store 1000 GWH for 24 hours.

Once again, you scare the world with big numbers . You have
the same big numbers for oil, coal or gas:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-for that coal mine in Germany,
(http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=f...1,6.502876&spn=0.160411,0.31311&t=h&z=12&om=1)
they have to dig 200 meter deep on ?50 square kilometers and they
made a 200 meter high hill with 1.1 billion cubic meter of
??overburden. A total 15 billion cubic meter of ??overburden were
removed just to get 2.5 billion ton of lignite: just ten year of
Germany coal consumption.
http://www.mhwsmits.com/us/photo/hbtext.htm
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/2005coal.PNG

-the Europort in Rotterdam/Netherland (200 km north west from
the German mine , where on 50 km you have an oil harbor + oil
infrastructures.
http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=f...,4.350586&spn=0.042864,0.064631&t=h&z=14&om=1
(go/drag downstream west=left up to North Sea 'shore')

-Tihange/Belgium (60 km west from the German coal mine): 3 * 1 GW
nuclear power plant, the equivalent of 6 million ton of coal a
year on half a square kilometer:
http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&hl=f...,5.271785&spn=0.020595,0.039139&t=k&z=15&om=1
Neater ?

You could find hundreds of such sites in the US too.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Energy storage:
---------------
5 kWh for each amercian is 1.5 billion kWh to be stored for
24 hours (less in fact):

It can be stored in 30 dams containing one cubic kilometer: one
billion cubic meter of water at a 200 meter height.
30(dam) * 1E12(m3) * 200(m)/3.6E6(kWh) = 1.66E9 kWh QED

Or one single Itaipu: 29E9 m3 and 196 meter high
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_d'Itaipu (the english
version do not have the data table)

Double these numbers, there must be a high and a low lake.

It would be better to have few hundreds of smaller ones.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Here, megalo-maniacly from my laptop, it looks pretty easy .
Hurry up guys, do it

Have to solve that flat tire on my bicycle now

Erdy

 

[Erdemal]

And at $600 per 1 m2 panel those 4,000 sq mi would cost 6000 TRILLION dollars to cover
with PV panels.

Just a little mistake

$6 trillion ! 4000 * 1.6 * 1.6 * 1E6 * 600 = $6122 billion

That's 462 times the annual US GDP !
Graham

Half US GDP

Erdy

 

[Eeyore]

Just a little mistake

$6 trillion ! 4000 * 1.6 * 1.6 * 1E6 * 600 = $6122 billion


Half US GDP

My other post corrected the error.

Graham

 

[Mauried]

Once again, you scare the world with big numbers . You have
the same big numbers for oil, coal or gas:

I dont understand what you mean.
1000 GWH isnt a big number for an quantity of electricity.
Its the typical output of a 2 GW Base Load Power station for 3 weeks.
If you make it with Solar then you will have to store it in some form
to account for night time and cloudy days.
I merely asked how this will be done and how much does it cost to do
it.
Storing oil , coal and gas is easy, storing electricity isnt.

 

[Mauried]

>

Why have public storage? Why not use the PV part just when the sun is out?

Have each power user have their own storage system... You want power at
night, then you have the batteries inside your own house...

Doing this it would be simple to do...
Make the PV power plant...
Have free electricity during the daylight hours (sunrise till sunset).
Charge a large amount for electricity during the night because someone would
have to make the electricity using old ways...
So those people who want free electricity would install some sort of storage
system (yes they will have to pay up front for the batteries and the
maintenance but they get free electricity

Donald

Who will pay for the PV power plant if the electricity it makes is
free.
You also assume incorrectly that the only users of electricity are
residential houses.
Where will Industry get its electricity from.

 

[Erdemal]

I dont understand what you mean.

I just meant that it's feasible. It will just require big
infrastructures. But not only solar requires big infrastructures
then I listed some non solar big infrastructure examples.

1000 GWH isnt a big number for an quantity of electricity. Right

Its the typical output of a 2 GW Base Load Power station for 3 weeks. Right

If you make it with Solar then you will have to store it in some form
to account for night time and cloudy days. Right

I merely asked how this will be done and how much does it cost to do
it.

Oil + Gas import cost between 5 and 10% of nations GDP (no transport,
no reffining, no distribution included). USA *imports* 13 million oil
barrel *a_day*(1): 13E6 x 100 x 365 = $474 billion a year: 3% of US GDP
Only for oil imports. For European countries or Japan, it's close to
10% of GDP if you add natural gas.

Not little money either (not talking to *whom* we pay that money).

Solar will have a cost and benefits.

For the cost of storage, I just took the dams example: 30 dams or
one single Itaipu to show there too that it's 'feasible'. But tuning
kWh price as a reverse function of sun availability would promote
investments in any kind of storage, another possibility.

Storing oil , coal and gas is easy, storing electricity isnt.

*RIGHT* . And for oil, coal, gas: price is rising, *suspected* to
cause a global warming via CO2 emission when burned, reserves are
limited and out of our control, rotten the air we breathe (ozone
in summer + small particules all year long). Not talking of oil
spills, oil wars, oil dictatures, ...

Solar is feasible *now* with current technology.

Erdy

(1)https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2175rank.html

 

[Eeyore]

>

Why have public storage? Why not use the PV part just when the sun is out?

Have each power user have their own storage system... You want power at
night, then you have the batteries inside your own house...

CRACKPOT ! You haven't a clue do you ? So, it's not a replacement for grid
electricity in that case.

Graham