Hillhater said:
Does he even know what 9GW of solar looks like ?
billvon said:
A square about 10 miles across.
Billvon, I don't know if you deliberately refuse to look at basic wikipedia math or in denial but 10square miles is right here the Topaz Solar farm. (grammar corrected!)
Quote from Wikipedia
"Site area 9.5 sq mi (25 km2)
(125 MW avg. power)" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm <-
billvon said:
Why? Would be smaller and simpler than a coal fired power plant. Let's do the math:
Billvon, I don't like casting accusations but your so bad at math on solar you should be banned from the forum for wasting peoples time and wasting database CPU time/storage resources of the Endless-sphere server, yeah this is a harsh statement but what does it take to get it through?
You can look at
REAL WORLD SOLAR DATA in the perfect conditions in the desert of the USA and see you get an average of around 125MW output for about 10square miles of solar panels in the desert of the USA compared to say a 4000MW nuclear/coal power plant, when it comes to coal or nuclear what it says is pretty much what you get in real power delivery, especially if its any particular time you need it which is the opposite of solar/wind.
![Topaz Solar Farm Wikipedia.jpg Topaz Solar Farm Wikipedia.jpg](https://endless-sphere.com/sphere/data/attachments/116/116803-92d20aa93cc217f258bdf613d92ed2f8.jpg)
Topaz Solar Farm 2014 total year output 1,053,373MWh. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm <-
1,053,373MWh / 8760_hours_in_one_year =
120MW average output or
0.12GW! thats very far from 9GW output comment you say "A square about 10 miles across" As it's much closer to one tenth of a single 1 GW and no where near 9GW.
If you chose just the winter months of the Topaz solar farm its even worse like 76MW output average! or
(0.07GW) for 10 square miles
Quote from Wikipedia
"2016 December MWh total was 56,698MWh"
56,698MWh / 744_hours_in_december = 76MW average power output!
We just keep getting further and further away from your
9GW as quoted, your so wrong its just ridiculous.
These numbers have been on Wikipedia for a long time, no one disputes them, they are taken directly from the https://www.eia.gov/ website.
4000MW coal or nuclear power station is 4GW for reference, while they do have maintenance on particular turbines if they need to run solid for a few months non-stop for winter or summer its very standard job for such a power-station to do, a lot of them still work out for 85% capacity factor in general.
If you want even more power no problem just build a "slightly" bigger one.. Like the Bruce Nuclear power station in Canada over 6000MW (6GW) at 85% capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Like I said before next gen nuclear like the Bill Gates Terra-power reactor uses nuclear waste as fuel and only needs to be
refueled every 60years!
Theres no point talking about what kind of power a real world 10square mile solar farm could create if it was left to run for 10 years just so you can say "wow".. because a coal or nuclear power plant would still be 100's of times more energy if measured over the same period of time.
These large solar farms take 3-4 years to create so if you wanted one 10 times bigger to even remotely begin to compare for just 1GW average power output then it could take 30-40 years to complete if built at the same rate.. If you ever watch National Geographic on wildlife in these dry areas you would know there is in fact a lot of wildlife you would be covering/killing when blocking their sun, the fact is its disgracefully environmentally damaging.
Screen shot of data of Topaz Solar farm 10square miles in the desert data from Wikipedia, in case you can't look at wikipedia pages for some reason..
![download.jpg download.jpg](https://endless-sphere.com/sphere/data/attachments/116/116785-8762e6abaea8a1ac9dc704ff61fe29a3.jpg)
One thing I wonder about with you Billvon is why are you wasting people's time with baloney solar information.
I been thinking about people like you, Is it because it's not supporting your political tribe?
https://youtu.be/S74C-XF9kYY
[youtube]S74C-XF9kYY[/youtube]
I decided to update this post to just try and inject a bit more information.
I love this claim it says below, "just 254km2 will power the whole world!" I have seen the youtube videos of these as well, very convincing but just so wrong.
It's amazing to see massive FB shares of this stuff with at least around 500,000 people believing it so much they shared it on their Facebook page.
But what about checking it with real world data in 15seconds?
So let's break it down, it literally takes seconds to work out these claims with real world data via Wikipedia which is usually directly taken from official government websites and energy generators, and is easily verifiable for your self.
The summary below is for the required size of solar farm for just USA's energy needs alone and not the world.
The Topaz 25km2 solar farm put out 1,301 GWh 2015 (its best year ever!) Numbers from Wikipedia which come directly from the US http://eia.gov official website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm#Statistics
Energy used in the USA ( 2013 ) 25,451,000 GWh (or 25,451TWh). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Current_consumption
So its 25,451,000GWh / 1,301GWh = 19,562 Topaz-solar-farms required. (19,562_solar_farms x 25km2) = 489,050km2
So it's a total solar farm size of 489,050km2 or 188,823 square miles.
Roughly the size of Texas, but wait this is only part of the problem.
Every time you see a meme that seems like baloney it probably is. If you do the numbers for battery storage that's when the numbers and costs become truly mind boggling.
While Topaz took 3 years to build which is pretty fast, for the whole USA it would at the same build rate take 58,686 years but of course we could get more people on it and crank out more solar panel factories to make more panels, how about it magically being built 10 times faster? then that means it would only take 5,868 years for the whole of the USA alone to build its clean solar based energy future (excluding energy storage etc).
Their are so many problems to this and the biggest one is how poor the human brain can function in the face of bias, the lust for seemingly free energy over-rides peoples logic part of the brain, I can only assume some folks would still look at the above data and think yeah we can do that!
Building a structure this large is going to take at least a 1000+ years and thats OK? What about the cost, this solar farm was $2.4billion.
19,562_topaz_solar_farms x $2.4b
Topaz Solar farm Wikipedia page quote
Construction cost $2.4 billion
So its
46,948,800,000,000 thats $46 Trillion dollars for a USA solar farm.
If you do numbers for energy storage costs that's when it gets even more insane, the reason why most renewable energy projects dont have energy storage because the costs are completely unviable.
EIA Topaz Solar farm generation numbers for Topaz Solar Farm https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/57695
When you check out the most modern scientific studies they all conclude that solar farms are far more destructive to the environment than any other energy generation, they block light and prevent co2 sequestration. The entire point of "green energy" is to reduce co2 emissions and help the environment.
Every time you see a solar farm you should be thinking how little power it creates to a real power-plant and how much wildlife is being killed/displaced for no good reason.
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nature-vital-climate.html
https://www.nature.org/newsfeatures/pressreleases/new-study-finds-nature-is-vital-to-beating-climate-change.xml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8L9EAWF3E
[youtube]EJ8L9EAWF3E[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ
[youtube]fA5sGtj7QKQ[/youtube]