Surface Area Required To Solar Power The World

Jon, I wonder who would be the slave this time!

Slavery? I’m sure if various countries’ troops can survive desert conditions then we most certainly can look after the construction crews needed to build these systems. Slavery has nothing to do with it. To my mind it those countries who are precisely benefiting from the current oil-based energy system in pace have a vested interest in looking towards the next step. Sand will most certainly be an issue but again, let the technologists think up the answers – even if it takes more man/machine power to have some some sort of shifting system that allows the panels to move with the sands rather than battle with them, the cost-saving from having to ship billions of tonnes of oil/coal/gas to the generation source will go in no small way towards offsetting that cost I’m sure.

As we in the West begin to run out of oil then we will need to turn to other options of energy, and a measure of this will need to be imported from systems such as this. In the UK, due to a lack of suitable sites on our own home turf and public defiance in the form of nimbysm we struggle to make use of our own natural energy resources, making these projects all the more needed.

I have to disagree with the former opinions. Just recently it was announced that a couple of corporations have joined to build the largest solar power plant yet in the Sahara desert. You can read about it e.g. at http://www.greenbang.com/plans-for-massive-desert-solar-power-project-set-in-motion_10727.html (en) or at http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article3933262/Deutsche-planen-groesstes-Solarkraftwerk-aller-Zeiten.html (de).

The only purpose of this graphic – and I think it does it well – is that the area required is not unrealistically large, and that the world’s deserts could easily “hide” them. Powering the world with solar power thus is not a utopian but a feasible idea for the future.

Great map, but you should explain that the map is not conserving areas, so it can be a bit confusing (the map’s projection is not the best to show surfaces required.)

Though it makes for a nice thought experiment, as mentioned, it would be unpractical in the end. Manufacturing, distribution, construction and silicon availability (the cost of which increased twenty-fold in the last 10 years) would make this project take decades and be left at the mercy of politics and economic realities. Not saying solar power in not a viable solution, simply not possible at this scale.

My question would be – how much roofspace in the UK with solar PV would need to be covered to meet the UK’s electricity needs. Do we have enough roofspace and sunlight hours per year.

Try it with Solar hot water too – on an overcast day your water would heat up enough to bathe in, on a sunny day the system has to vent because the water temp goes over 100 degrees celsius…

Whenever large-scale solar is discussed you have this outpouring of angst for hypothetical victims and concerns over dust. I have lived and worked in deserts and they are much healthier places to live than the tropics. Australia has the hottest deserts in the world, and I have done hard manual work in temperatures over 40C. And for the clever chap predicting fatalities, there are already millions of people living in these regions, for whom these temperatures are not difficult, let alone fatal. What kills them is poverty.

Oh, and for the record, you clean the panels/reflectors/heliostats at night. You don’t need water to remove dust from suitably manufactured glass, a soft cloth works fine.

I have spoken to workers who have cleaned panels at the Barstow, California Solar One plant, I think the main complaint was that it was a bit boring. But no more so than cleaning offices.
The wages they were paid would go rather a long way in sub Saharan Africa, one of the worlds most desperately poor regions. Better yet if the people who live there already were given jobs, there are no acclimatization issues, and less need for young people to move to overcrowded and terribly poor urban slums.

If you want to talk about slavery, look at the practice of agriculture in the torrid zones. Look at where your coffee and cocoa come from. Look at the land area required to feed the world, and compare it to the land area needed to power it. Yes, this isn’t an accurate projection, Its an order-of-magnitude demonstration of how little is needed.

Its also not about silicon, for the ill informed fellow making that comment. Concentrating solar thermal uses nothing more exotic than steel, glass and concrete, with water as a working fluid to drive turbines. And before some bright spark for the CEC starts that “embodied energy ” nonsense, the energy payback period on these plants is generally in the months, not years, and represent a massive amplification of energy resources.

Wouldn’t it depend as much on where the solar panels were put on how many we’d need?

Surely somewhere like England couldn’t generate as much electricity through solar panels as Central Africa where there’s more sun? Has that been taken into account in how much land area would need to have solar panels?

So what about the electric car and clean coal – don’t we need to take the steps we have the technology for now – and retro fit all of the old coal burning plants before we strip the rain forest of palm oil?

While for the moment the widescale destruction of rainforests in South East Asia continues, hopefully the palm oil story will serve as a cautionary tale which will lead to much better informed policymaking and behaviure. Politicians must resist the urge to rush to legislate and subsidise in order to bask in the glow of being seen to be “doing something” while a number of so-called green companies profit from taxpayer subsidised destruction. Energy policy must make sense from a scientific (i.e. it should be energy positive), economic and environmental viewpoint. However the continued promotion of ethanol and coal-to-liquids calls for continued skepticism.

I feel like this total area is much, much less than the total area of roads in the world. Imagine if substantial roadway countries on in each region (e.g. US, GB, Germany, China, India, etc.) found a way inlay a significant area of solar collection panels into/alongside roadways (which collect and store a tremendous amount of heat as it is) and partially subsidized the cost by selling surplus energy to neighboring countries. It’s too bad the world doesn’t work this way. Way too bad that most buildings with solar panels only install enough to power the building. It would be nice if there were more widespread programs to sell surplus energy into the power grids the way some countries do for wind energy.

Whats missing from a lot of these discussions about renewable energy is transmission. Often times the best locations for solar plants ( i.e. the Sahara ) and wind farms as well is far from places of consumption. I’ve been involved with some clean energy projects and time and time again, the bottleneck is building the transmission infrastructure which is costly to build and maintain.

Take for example China, for all intents and purposes on track to becoming the largest energy consumer in the world. The government is set to meet its goal of 15% energy capacity coming from renewable sources by 2020 however the reality is most of the wind farms built to meet this goal aren’t even connected to the grid due to difficulty with getting transmission lines built.

I wish people would get over their fear of nuclear power. With all the stupid ***** we do to the environment the fact that people view the one in a million chance of something going wrong with a nuclear reactor as a real and pressing issue speaks volumes about the general populaces inability to assess risk in a rational manner.

Solar Cell Performs the best at 25 Degree C Abient Temperature so Solar PV not But Solar Thermal Power Plant are ideal for deserts.

“the fact that people view the one in a million chance of something going wrong with a nuclear reactor as a real and pressing issue speaks volumes about the general populaces inability to assess risk in a rational manner.” – The problem with nuclear is not the possibility of disaster but the problem with waste.

“The efficiency of solar power is still disappointing” – The efficiency of solar power, and other renewables, is very much equivalent to that of traditional generation; without the waste, environmental damage, and maintenance costs.

A quick google shows this: “The current market leader in solar panel efficiency (measured by energy conversion ratio) is SunPower, a San Jose based company. Sunpower’s cells have a conversion ratio of 23.4%, well above the market average of 12-18%. However, advances past this efficiency mark are being pursued in academia and R&D labs with efficiencies of 42% achieved at the University of Delaware in conjunction with DuPont by means of concentration of light. The highest efficiency achieved without concentration is by Sharp Corporation at 35.8% using a proprietary triple-junction manufacturing technology in 2009.”

Thanks for the Information.

Enjoying reading the posts here, thanks.

The areas seem so small compared to whole planet that need power !