100 square miles of hydro solar would power good chunk of usa.
and add in following
no coal mines
no co2
no coal ash
no Mercury
it almost free
and sun goes out i think we will have bigger problems then how to run are ac
Last year the first commercial solar plant with heat storage opened near Guadix, Spain, east of Granada. During the day, sunlight from a mirror field is used to heat molten salt. In the evening, as the salt cools, it gives back heat to make more steam. In Arizona the Solana Generating Station will also use molten salt for storage. When it goes on line in 2012, three square miles of parabolic troughs will produce 280 megawatts for Phoenix and Tucson. Solana is being built by a Spanish company, Abengoa Solar—an indication of just how far, in the development of this technology, the United States has fallen behind.
Back in the 1980s, an engineer named Roland Hulstrom calculated that if photovoltaic panels—the other big solar technology—covered just three-tenths of a percent of the United States, a 100-by-100-mile square, they could electrify the entire country.
Source(s):
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/0…
More Pages:
- Solar Power: Do Know About Solar Thermal Power Plant Clean Power Plants In World? (6/19/2011)
- Why aren’t we building environmentally friendly homes?
- Solar Turbines: What Is The Average Power Requirement For The United States, In Watts? (Hint: 1 = 1 )? (5/16/2012)
- Solar Turbines: Do U Think It Is Wrong To Use Nuclear Power Plant? (5/11/2012)
- Solar Energy: How Much Money Would It Cost If We Used Solar Energy And Kinetic Energy To Supply The United States? (6/14/2011)
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Solar thermal is awesome, especially for the Southwest United States. But until recently, there wasn’t any storage available, so you had to have another source of electricity for when clouds came or during the night.
But the real answer to your question is ECONOMICS. The way that our electricity system is currently set up is that a government agency, typically called a public utilities commission, regulates the electric utilities in a state. In exchange for giving the utilities a monopoly on electricity production, the utilities have to provide cheap electricity. The public utility commissions were set up to protect consumers from having to pay too much.
Unfortunately the cheapest energy in the U.S. is coal, and it will remain that way until we tax carbon or figure out how to make renewables cheaper. Or, we can change the mission of public utilities commissions to protect the environment and consumers.
The FUEL for renewables is free, but the construction costs (and sometimes maintenance costs) are HUGE. The new solar thermal plant in Arizona costs $ 2 BILLION dollars. Currently solar thermal costs about $ .14/kWh, solar PV costs about $ .20/kWh, and wind costs about $ .07/kWh. Compare to coal at $ .04/kWh and natural gas at $ .06.
And that is our problem.