Climate Policy

[Zenda]

Here is a wiki article on photovoltaics. Check the section on disadvantages.

There is a list of advantages too, in case you missed that. But let's look at some of those "disadvantages" more closely.

"A major drawback is the sheer volume of land required to house a solar power generation plant.... At the same time, photovoltaics take up no land at all when installed on existing rooftops or on land not otherwise used, such as decommissioned coal pits or in deserts."

Apparantly, it depends on where you build things. Good thing we have a choice in that.

"Depending on the cost of the installation and local electric rates the payback can be 14–20 years."

That's even better as the 20 years we calculated before. Nice.

"Solar electricity is not available at night and is less available in cloudy weather conditions from conventional silicon based technologies. Therefore, a storage or complementary power system is required. However, the use of germanium in amorphous silicon-germanium thin film solar cells provides residual power generating capacity at night due to background infrared radiation. Fortunately, most power consumption is during the day, so solar does not need to be stored at all as long as it offsets peak and 'shoulder' consumption."

So, it's there when we need it most, but could generate some power even at night. Sounds efficient.

"Limited power density: Average daily insolation (output of a flat plate collector at latitude tilt) in the contiguous US is 3-7 kilowatt·h/m²"

That's interesting. This means we would only need 3 to 1.3 m2 of collector to cover the consumption of 9041 Wh/day that you used in your calculations.

Since we are looking at Wiki now, did you see this page?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy

"The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."

Note this is the energy that reaches the surface, after half of the total is already absorbed by atmosphere and clouds.

Let's go slow

Is that the site where you also get your arguments regarding human caused global warming? :lol:

But I don't have to worry where you get your support from. As someone on another forum remarked: "Nature doesn't care about consensus". Apart from that, there is also the bad mathematics. Take this for example:

9041 Wh / day divided by four gives 2260 Watts

9041 Wh/day = 9041*60*60 Joule/day = 9041*60*60/24*60*60 Watt. If we divide that by 4, we get 9041/(24*4) = 94.2 Watt. Looking at your (wrong) number of 23 W/m2 for northern U.S. (winter), it would seem we need less then 4 m2 even there:)