[at-l] Home Solar Power (Non-Hiking)

[jbkramer@afn.org (Bryan Kramer)]

The theoretical solar input of the earth above the athmosphere is 164
watts per square meter but by the time you get to the ground and
subtract the inefficiencies of converting light to electricity you only
get about 20 watts/m3. So a 2000 MW plant ( the size of a base load Nuke
plant) would occupy.

(2000MWe X 1000000 Mwe/Watt)/20 watts/m3 = 100 square kilometers or
about 6 miles by 6 miles of solar arrays.

And that doesn't account for cloudy days, what to do at night and so on.
The idea is completely wacko.
A big city like Los Angeles would require hundreds of square miles of
arrays. You can imagine arrays as far as you can see from LA to the
Arizona border.

 Space based solar would make a lot of sense if you could figure out how
to get the power down to the ground. 

Bryan

 
> 
> > to produce useful electricity from a steam turbine requires an 
> > enormous array of mirrors -- square miles of mirrors, each 
> carefully 
> > focused on a single point and tracking the sun as it moves 
> across the 
> > sky
> 
>  
>      ***   Seems I remember that mirror generator as being 
> only about 50 feet 
> or so round. How much energy they were generating I don't know...