Fissile Thorium Reactor

[kandrathe]

Solar cells: a higher chance of success than fusion to get commercially attractive energy and so many options.

Assume an annual Kwh consumption of 4200Kwh (source). Divide by 365 days in the year and you get 11,500 watt hours/day. The sun yields roughly 1,366 watts/meter2. But, it's never going to be such that you have constantly good sun, or 100% efficient solar conversion. We also have clouds, dust, albedo, ozone, water vapor, etc absorbing 53% of the suns energy before it hits the ground. Assuming 20% efficiency of solar cells (yes, maybe we'd get to 40% some day but not now for commercially available ones). Coincidently the basic system described in Solar Power 101 generates optimally 11.5 kWh/day, but actually about 20 to 30 percent less on the best days. The cost of solar is estimated to be roughly 20 to 24 cents per kilowatt hour over the life of the array and battery storage, whereas I'm paying $0.0834 per Kwh on my electric bill now. So, if my electric bills happen to triple in price and the cost of solar arrays drops significantly then it might be more viable.

Thinking about this another way, at 10-watts per square-foot solar collection to replace the electrical energy generation of New York (12,133,000 MW or 12,133,000,000,000 watts) with solar cells would cover 1,213,300,000,000 square feet, or 43,521 square miles, while the actual land mass of New York State is only 49,112 square miles. (source)

Here is a calculator to see if solar is a good choice for locations in America. (link). For me plugging in the values from my average energy bills, the system to replace 80% of my current consumption(meaning I'm still on the grid) would cost about $125,000 and would pay for itself in just 45 years. Of course, I would probably replace it at least once in that time period.

The bottom line here is that solar power is too dilute to adequately replace our current consumption, or even half our current consumption. I see that Ontario is moving ahead with spending 100 million dollars to build two 10MW solar concentrating plants (at a price of $.42/Kwh CDN), which is enough to help power up to 7000 households(probably less). Ontario has about 3,924,515 households, so you will need 560 more solar plants of this size to replace the consumption of all Ontario homes, then there is industry and business. I couldn't find specifications on the scale of the projects to determine the land mass required for these power plants.

storage: when going for wind or solar we need to be able to store energy for days without sun and wind

Better to not store it, due to the risks and costs of storage infrastructure.

hydrogen economy: because planes don't fly on electricity

Jets fly on thrust. I'm not stuck on burning stuff to produce thrust if there is a better way.

energy conservation: whatever we do, we need to use less energy, period.

Good thought. But US and Europe populations are shrinking, if you subtract emigration. The growth in consumption worldwide will be in the under-developed world as it begins to industrialize. I don't think we have time to watch this all unfold. All alternative energy accounts for just 2.2% to 3% of energy production. It would take a massive shift in investment to even double it, so do you really think we can wait for 40 to 50 years until Fusion or alternative energy becomes significant?