Department of Agriculture

[kandrathe]

Simply, direct solar works on small scale (a home), but does not work on a large scale (city) due to amount of power need, inefficiencies of solar cells at this time, and size of space needed to produce the power. You're more likely to be able to get better efficiencies and more generation through indirect solar power (wind).

Both these ideas seem counter-intuitive. The only advantage of distribution is redundancy and failover. If you can't imagine a large plant being efficient, then splitting it into thousands, or millions of smaller ones will logically be much more inefficient. If direct solar is inefficient, then why would wind power be any more efficient (generally)? I think there are corridors where it is windy enough to give a viable boost, but at the cost of damaging the skyline and noise pollution. I'm also skeptical for most sites of the total cost of building the turbine and tower, installation, plus annual maintenance ever being repaid by the generation. Often wind, like solar, tend to be more of a politically correct implementation, rather than practical.

The other problem is sheer power density of all power producing methods compared to nuclear. To put into perspective, the standard fission reaction, 200 MeV (splitting of U235 or Th233 atom), is about 8 fold that of a chemical reaction, 3 eV (like combustion). A single fission reaction produces as much energy as 66,000,000 CH4 + 2 O2.

Spot on. Density is the key.