And the profits grow

[kandrathe]

actually present research shows that we would only need to "harvest" 1/10000th of the amount of solar energy that comes to earth to be able to meet all of our energy requirements. Most recently a panal of scientists and engineers including Ray Kurzweil, whom i mentioned earlier, convened by the American Association of Engineers gave their findings at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In it they, not only, describe how the use of Solar Power Cells are doubling every two years but how advancements in nanotechnology will increase the efficiency while creating smaller and lighter panals and how the use of concentrators using parabolic mirrors can focus large amounts of solar energy onto small sections of Power Cells.

I'm sorry, how do concentrators change the equation? You still need to intercept 1m^2 to get theoretically 1000 watts. If the 1m^2 at the edge of space with 100% collection yields 1366 watts per square meter, then how do you use nano-technology or smoke and mirrors to increase anything beyond your research budget? We can use parabolic mirrors and lenses to concentrate solar energy now to melt salt. This sounds like the proverbial Mr. Barnum selling the suckers (who are born every minute) with deep pockets on the merits of buying into phantom energy.

Think of it another way. The average home uses about 877 kWh per month. Divide that by 30 days and 8 hours of decent sun a day giving 240 hours to possibly generate the 877 kWh meaning that every day every home must generate 29.23 kWh (877kWh / 30 days) over that eight hour period (29.23 kWh / 8 hours) is 3654.167 watts. This means about 18 or 19 solar panels of about 200 watts. This requires about 30 square meters per home, or 30 square meters x 114,317,700 households in the US is 3429531000 square meters of solar panels. That is equivalent of 1,324.15 square miles covered with solar panels. For comparison, Rhode Island is 1,545 square miles. Using the Sanyo Model from below, solar panels costing 656.25$ /square meter means 3,429,531,000 square meters x 656.25$/sq meter = $2,250,629,718,750. Of course, there would be some discounts in buying them in bulk.

That's a lot of infrastructure my friend. Add to that another huge amount of energy needed for transportation and industry. I'm not saying solar won't help. I'm saying it is too dilute to be the magic bullet that will solve our energy problems. Hoping that endless investment into technology can undo the laws of physics (solar constant) is not the answer either.

Edit: Fixed a math issue called out by Zenda. I was off by two decimal places in one conversion.