cross-posted from : https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/62503515
Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
cross-posted from : https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/62503515
Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
What point are you trying to make? Building a solar farm the size of the entire nation of Germany would produce a lot of power, yes. In fact covering such big of an area with any type of power plant would do it.
The point is that the land is already being used to grow plants that are used for energy production, which is likely less efficient than the same land simply used to directly generate electricity, with the soil below used for more useful plants that are not used for energy with Agrivoltaics.
I agree 100%, I just don’t think the post title makes sense. As if covering that whole area with solar panels was a reasonable alternative, or something worth considering.
I’m not sure I follow. All of that land distributed across the globe is already covered in plants that produce something to be burnt, why would it be unreasonable to consider using that same land for solar panels and food or non-burnt plant resources instead?
Food and other farming, yes absolutely.
What I mean is that the biggest solar farm in the world is under 100km². 320.000km² of solar farms would be over 3200 times bigger than the biggest existing solar farm, and require more solar panels than it’s anywhere near feasible to produce. It would be an Apollo Program scale project to build something like that, at the very least, and probably just impossible in any reasonable human timeframe due to lack of resources to build that many panels, even if you could tenfold the worldwide amount of solar panel factories.
It was difficult to find sources that would let me (poorly) crunch the numbers of how feasible it would be to cover that amount of land. Here’s what I came up with:
According to this site, by next year the top solar manufacturing companies in China alone will be able to produce a combined 830GW of panels per year.
And according to this site, the largest solar farm currently in the world is the Gonghe Talatan Solar Park, which has a capacity of 15.6GW, and totals 609km² of land area used.
Based on that back of the napkin math (I want to emphasize math is not my strong suit, nor are these reference statistics ideal), it would take roughly 10 years to produce the amount of panels required to cover 320,000km². That’s assuming the referenced solar farm is roughly the correct amount of area required for that capacity of GW (It probably isn’t, and there seems to be some wild variations on land usage in the second link above, with much more land used for a much smaller amount of installed GWs).
The article the OP references suggests that 320,000km² of panels would produce 1,400TWh of energy per year. In comparison, our reference solar farm extended out 53.2 times would produce 952,173GWh per year, so definitely a bit of an inefficient use of space compared to a more ideal design, but it at least shows us we’re in the ballpark.
Actually installing that amount of capacity will likely take longer than 10 years, but it certainly seems feasible to achieve within, say, a 20 to 30 year time frame assuming it became a priority for governments around the world. My calculation also did not take into account the manufacturing capacity of the rest of the world, which would shorten the time frame of actually producing the panels substantially (probably bring it down to about 7 years, I’m guessing). It also assumes more factories will not be built during that time frame.
Also, I should note that the title of the article and of the OP is misleading, as the 320,000km² example would actually produce a little more than the entire planet’s electricity needs, not just what’s needed for EV’s (which would take up about 1/4 of that, but also assumes public transport does not expand).
I don’t know how the article measured it, but when I looked at the solar farm on Google Maps it was nowhere close to 600km², I measured it to be 100km² (I think it was the same if be). I think the 600 is the total area owned by the place, not actual area covered by solar panels. So that’s 5-6 times of a difference. But then again, no idea how the original claim was measured.
Plus your math assumes we stop using solar panels worldwide and 100% production goes to our new little Apollo Program for the however many years.
Not impossible… Same way how replacing worldwide power plans with 100% nuclear isn’t impossible. Just… Not in the realm of possibilities.
Hm, looking further, this NY times article says the Talatan Solar Park is 162 square miles, which would be 263km². But as you say, I also don’t know how they’re measuring it, so it’s difficult to nail down a solid number to use.
at 263km² it would take 22 years, and at 100km it would take 60 years to build enough panels. That’s a pretty huge gulf between them, so it’d be nice if we had more concrete stats to work from. If we assume that global solar manufacturing will increase in the future (during the build out), and account for global production and not just China, I still think we could fit it somewhere around 30 to 35 years.
The article mentions that there would be significant environmental drawbacks if every square inch of that 320,000km was turned into solar farm, it just uses it as an example of how much more efficient the biofuel land would be with panels in any percentage. It seems to make sense to convert it wherever possible, at least as a more effective use of the land, production and emissions-wise.
My calculations presumably still mostly work (I think) assuming all solar panels manufactured globally are eventually installed somewhere, not necessarily only on biofuel land. It seems fairly inevitable due to the economics of solar and wind that virtually everything produced will be installed somewhere (though some countries will be slower to adopt than others depending on how much the fossil fuel industry has control over local politicians), and thus if things continue as they are, we could almost certainly be totally off fossil fuels within our lifetimes.