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Dan Luke wrote:
On Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:35:05 -0500, Jim Logajan wrote:



The total land surface area of the Earth is ~150,000,000 km^2 [3] so the
percentage needed is (drum roll, please!) 100*1,700,000/150,000,000 ~=

1.1%

A tad over 1% of the land surface - a little over three times the area
consumed by water reservoirs and probably much less area than that used
for farming. Another comparison is road surface area. I've seen
estimates that indicate that roads in the U.S. and UK take up ~1% to
1.4% of the surface area of those countries.[4][5] And I haven't even
considered using ocean surface area, more efficient solar conversion,
higher insolation average, or even solar power satellites.

Even at today's low PV efficiencies, there appears to be adequate area
to use solar energy to power human civilization on this planet.


And no one except those unable to understand more than one concept at
a time thinks this is being proposed.

Some P-V, some solar thermal, some geothermal, some wind, some hydro,
some nuke, some algae-diesel; pretty soon we're telling OPEC to go
**** up a rope.

OPEC and oil has little to nothing to do with electricity in North
America.

No. But producing enough power to plug in electric automobiles and making
bio-diesel from algae will have a lot to do with getting off the imported
oil addiction.