The scale problem for solar and wind generation of electricity

by Jonathan DuHamel on Aug. 06, 2012, under Energy

The current eco-fad of trying to produce an ever greater percentage of our electricity from solar and wind has some consequences on land use that are poorly thought out.

Robert Bryce, writing in Energy Tribune, takes out his calculator to see how much land would be used to achieve the green utopia (see his full article here).

The International Energy Agency expects the increase in demand for new electrical generation to be 450 terawatt-hours per year, which was the average annual increase every year from 1985 to 2011 (1 terawatt = 1 million megawatts).

How much solar energy would be needed to meet that demand? Bryce notes, “Germany has more installed solar-energy capacity that any other country, with some 25,000 megawatts of installed photovoltaic panels. In 2011, those panels produced 18 terawatt-hours of electricity. Just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, the world would have to install about 25 times as much photovoltaic capacity as Germany’s total installed base, and it would have to do so every year.” Where are we going to put all those panels? Apparently Germany has had enough with their solar experiment and are now building 23 new coal-fired plants.