Comments on: Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar

By: Installing Solar Panels On Earth – Grenk

Installing Solar Panels On Earth – Grenk — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:37:34 +0000

[...] Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar [...]

By: Paul Crowley

Paul Crowley — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:49:14 +0000

Oops! Sorry to have wronged you, and thanks!

By: admin

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:12:48 +0000

Map projection is an equal area Mollweide projection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollweide_projection
In any case, the scale of the areas is founded on a three measure cross-check of the longest East-West measure of three continents: Australia, North America, and Africa.

By: Need More Information… | MakeHeat

Need More Information… | MakeHeat — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:08:39 +0000

[...] solar panels, heating, cooling, water purification, etc.? UPDATE: Found the postulation here:http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 . Great comments – worth a perusal with a cup of solar [...]

By: Paul Crowley

Paul Crowley — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:19:06 +0000

Er, don’t you have to use an equal-area map to get a meaningful result here? Looking at the hugely disproportionate size of Canada and Africa, this blatantly isn’t one.

Or is it deliberate, so that the solar panel placed close to the equator looks disproportionately small?

If you do an accurate version of this map using an appropriate projection, I look forward to linking to it!

By: Powering Australia with solar energy « Antinuclear

Powering Australia with solar energy « Antinuclear — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:01:59 +0000

[...] The image is from a global map from the Land Generator Initiative whose calculations were based on the US Department of Energy’s figures of projected world consumption of energy in all of its forms (including traditionally consumed from generation via fossil fuels such as oil and coal.) as projected in 2030 – a staggering 199,721 terawatt hours. t’s a big area; however LGI says we could reduce that amount by 5% – 25% by adding in other renewable energy sources such as wind power, wave energy and existing hydroelectric. New hydroelectric facilities are not considered as an option as their establishment wreaks havoc upon the environment by flooding valleys and altering river flows downstream. By using concentrating solar power technologies, the amount of land required would be far less again and existing rooftop space utilised for solar power generation would further greatly reduce the amount of land set aside for such an initiative. Source: Land Generator Initiative [...]

By: Powering the world with Solar « Learning is beautiful

Powering the world with Solar « Learning is beautiful — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:29:22 +0000

[...] square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be done in 3 years. I don’t know about you, but I was expecting a lot more area, and when I first saw the [...]

By: Esto es criticable... - psicofxp.com

Esto es criticable... - psicofxp.com — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:18:00 +0000

[...] [...]

By: a pending green civil war is a fallacy « Infrascape Design

a pending green civil war is a fallacy « Infrascape Design — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:06:23 +0000

[...] energy projects get sited on disturbed lands like old mines and fallow agricultural lands. The LandArt Generator Project showed that you could generate more energy on the same footprint of all the existing coal mines [...]

By: admin

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:52:17 +0000

Using the US area of 9,629,091 square kilometers or 9,629,091,000,000 square meters:
.2KW per square meter of land x 9,629,091,000,000 square meters = 1,925,818,200,000KW peak capacity.
Assume that during the 8 hours, the efficiency of the entire system is only 25% due to weather conditions: 1,925,818,200,000KW x .25 = 481,454,550,000KW
Now multiply by the 8 hours (the above is the capacity and now we are multiplying to make KWh): 481,454,550,000KW x 8 hours = 3,851,636,400,000KWh

The world consumed about 140,000,000,000,000KWh in 2009. /365 days in a year = 384,000,000,000KWh per day.
In fact you have ten times more than enough. Or in other words, you could reduce all of your operating efficiencies by a factor of 10 and it still works out.