Musk proposed a seat of the pants estimate in an interview about how much solar array surface area would produce as much energy as THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE. He used the output of average solar equipment at less than optimal output (I forget, maybe it was 15% efficient cells).
I did my own seat of the pants order of magnitude estimate, looking at all the fossil fuels burned, nuke generated energy, geothermal, hydro, etc. I think he could defend it. However, it is not practical. The sun moves across the sky at a degree every 4 minutes. You can get pretty good output from contemporaneous panels that are at a 30 degree incident angle. You need to have additional 100 mile on a side solar farms spaced appropriately around the entire earth and the wire infrastructure to support it. You would need some redundancy to handle cloudiness. Or maybe a feces load of batteries, pump storage, gravity storage, something storage. Suffice it to say you have to have a lot of these arrays all around the earth, and maybe between the tropics of cancer and capricorn. Tricky 'cause there is a lot of ocean out there. I found his thought experiment useful to highlight just how much power the sun sends our way. You can barely see a 100 mile square plot of lane from space. It is truly tine compared to the surface of the earth. On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 6:43 PM paul dove <dov...@bellsouth.net> wrote: > Elon Musk said he can power the whole US with 100 square miles on solar > panels in Arizona > > SNIP > > -- Michael E. Ross (919) 585-6737 <http://voice.google.com/calls?a=nc,%2B19195856737> Land (919) 901-2805 <http://voice.google.com/calls?a=nc,%2B19199012805>Cell and Text (919) 576-0824 <https://www.google.com/voice/b/0?pli=1#phones> <http://voice.google.com/calls?a=nc,%2B19195760824> Tablet, Google Phone and Text -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20231107/a88ed06a/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ Address messages to ev@lists.evdl.org No other addresses in TO and CC fields HELP: http://www.evdl.org/help/
