i don't understand the resistance to renewable energy. some call it "alternative energy" as if it was some fringe fad that only people dressed in black, with pierced noses and covered in tatoos would use. but the reality is that we waste lots of resources on "conventional" (or as i prefer to call it - "dirty") energy.
think for a moment, covering a portion of the US desert with conventional solar photo voltaic seems like a crazy idea. but by the numbers it does not seem bad to me.
the US power consumption is roughly 3.34 TW in 2005. this includes gas and electricity. assuming 4% increase per year over the last 3 years due to growing population and economy, means 3.76 TW in 2008. let's assume no improvements in conservation (which is a very conservative assumption).
a typical PV installation takes 8 acres per MW (0.03 sq km) at an installed cost of $7 per watt. the US has 9,826,630 sq km of land, 286,352 Nevada, 295,253 Arizona and 314,917 New Mexico.
this means roughly 120,000 sq km would be needed to power the entire US energy needs, or less than 15% of three southwest states. the cost would be $26 trillion (roughly twice the 2007 GDP). of course this ignores transmission losses, now estimated to be 7%, but could be substantial the farther away you go. also, we would need some really big batteries (like pumping an ocean of water up during the day for electricity at night).
added benefit would be that we are a "deathstar" sending a beam of light reflected into space in some random direction causing who knows what havoc on some alien planet. (Chris)
Sources: U.S energy consumption by source, 1949-2005, Energy Information Administration, CIA Factbook
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