| Soundwave said: The sun is the provider and enabler of all life on the planet pretty much. If it can do that, it certainly can power our piddly little automobiles and homes. The sun emits a tremendous amount of solar energy onto the earth's surface, several times more than our energy needs require. The price of solar will continue to come down too. This is all the land needed (the purple square there) of solar panels to power the entire United States, and that could be obviously more spread out through the country into like 10-20 different spots.
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I love the lack of sense of scale that is conveyed on such pictures.
That is several trillion dollars worth of solar panels - and not including the cost of replacing faulty ones, often cleaning and mantaining them, bulding the remaining infrastructure needed and so on. Not to mention it also means 264 million metric tons (give or take a few million tons) of solar panels for the US alone - decades, and in some cases hundreds of years of extracting polycrystaline silicon, zinc, copper at current levels. Not to mention rare earths! Do we even have enough mineral reserves remaining for that?
That's why we need (and it is only feasible that is so) a patchwork of several kinds of clean energy, not a single one.
| deskpro2k3 said: can even make sidewalks and roads with solar panels, so during winter it can also melt ice, and snow. |
How is that so? Imagine a pitch-black sidewalk, which already absorbs and directly converts to heat nearly 100% of sunlight. I'm sure those are still covered by snow and ice on a harsh winter. Where is the energy to melt it coming from, it the solar panel will also pick up the very same sunlight? I don't think you are exactly thinking this through.
