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Quote from: Petrochemicals on 08/09/2021 03:20:43Quote from: alancalverd on 07/09/2021 22:51:54You can forget hydro. Practically all the useable sites in Scotland are either already developed or too precious to flood, and the rest of the UK is too flat. For solar panels, an average for the UK over a year is about 1 - 2 W/sq ft, so to meet 40 GW you need 20 - 40,000,000 000 square ft of panels, say 1,000,000 acres, about 2% of the total land area. That's only skimming the surface of the problem since you get no solar power at night, so you need at least 500 GWh of battery and 40 GW of inverter capacity to keep the grid running.And of course if we get rid of domestic gas heating and fossil-fuelled cars, we will need about 4 times the current grid capacity. By the time we have moved to all-electric traction and industry we will have about 15% of the country covered in solar cells. That will have quite an ecological impact. 2 percent or 4000 sq km is that is for 1/10th of the uk energy usage.You're falsely comparing secondary energy with primary energy. Secondary energy is far, FAR more useful. More importantly, it would be about 1/2 of the exergy (usable energy) of the UK. And we already have about a couple of percent of the UK covered with buildings. Sticking solar panels on a lot of them would be a big start. And we have other sources of power such as wind, much of it off-shore. So what's the big deal???And this isn't remotely a worldwide representative figure, the UK is EXTREMELY heavily populated. Most countries would need a much smaller fraction of their land area.Also this is a strawman- nobody is trying to power the UK off only solar power anyway. But if we did, so what anyway?? 2% is nothing. 70% of England is farmland for example. Why is 2% somehow magically an impossibly big number???
Quote from: alancalverd on 07/09/2021 22:51:54You can forget hydro. Practically all the useable sites in Scotland are either already developed or too precious to flood, and the rest of the UK is too flat. For solar panels, an average for the UK over a year is about 1 - 2 W/sq ft, so to meet 40 GW you need 20 - 40,000,000 000 square ft of panels, say 1,000,000 acres, about 2% of the total land area. That's only skimming the surface of the problem since you get no solar power at night, so you need at least 500 GWh of battery and 40 GW of inverter capacity to keep the grid running.And of course if we get rid of domestic gas heating and fossil-fuelled cars, we will need about 4 times the current grid capacity. By the time we have moved to all-electric traction and industry we will have about 15% of the country covered in solar cells. That will have quite an ecological impact. 2 percent or 4000 sq km is that is for 1/10th of the uk energy usage.
You can forget hydro. Practically all the useable sites in Scotland are either already developed or too precious to flood, and the rest of the UK is too flat. For solar panels, an average for the UK over a year is about 1 - 2 W/sq ft, so to meet 40 GW you need 20 - 40,000,000 000 square ft of panels, say 1,000,000 acres, about 2% of the total land area. That's only skimming the surface of the problem since you get no solar power at night, so you need at least 500 GWh of battery and 40 GW of inverter capacity to keep the grid running.And of course if we get rid of domestic gas heating and fossil-fuelled cars, we will need about 4 times the current grid capacity. By the time we have moved to all-electric traction and industry we will have about 15% of the country covered in solar cells. That will have quite an ecological impact.
I think "science journalism" is an oxymoron, like "military intelligence".