Quote:
Originally Posted by Southern Man
I stand corrected. My stats were from Duke energy alone.
That’s a heck of a lot more than solar could ever produce, unless we roofed over every parking lot with PV cells. (If the damn things were affordable, then I would enthusiastically support that.)
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Let me run some numbers
Solar's current effiecency is about 15%, or 200 W/m2 (watts per meter squared), those two powerplants at McGuire produce 2,300 MW (24/7/365). So for a solar field to hold the same amount of power it would need to be 11,040 MW (2300*24/5, because the Nuclear plant runs 24 hours a day and the solar would run 5 hours a day). 200W/m2 = 200 MW/km2, so we get 55.2 km2, or 13,800 acres, for those that can't picture how big this is, it is about a square chunck of land 4.5 miles on each side of the square. (in AZ, were you average 6.5 hours, you'd only need 10,600 acres, freeing up over 3,000 acres just based on location).
Just to show where I got the hours of total sun a day, Cape Hatteras (5.31), Greensboro (4.71), Charleston (5.06), so I averaged 5 for the area. And these are yearly averages, not just summer.
But what you are missing is the growth that solar has been experiencing. Effeciency up 600% in 40 years, cost down 96% in 40 years, that comes out to averageing 7.5% drop in price each year, with a 5% increase in efficency each year, No other power source can come close to that growth.
Meaning that if it keeps to it's 40 year average, than in 10 years, it will be about 63% more efficent (meaning that the land needed would be cut by over 5,300 acres) and the cost would be less than 1/2 (about 46%) of what it is now.