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How many ha of solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That's about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.
4GW per hour, 24 hours a day would be 96GWh per day.
One statistic I found said that it takes 2.97 acres to make 1GWh of power over a year. Converting that to GWh per day per acre gives me 0.000922.
Dividing the 96GWh by 0.000922 gives me ~104,121.48 acres or ~402 sq. miles.
Don't compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
Is bio ethanol bad?
The thing with biofuels is that they could be used to feed people instead
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up n the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
Now do the same math for solar.
I didn't know solar panels could laugh.
to give a visual indication of that comparison:
ha
vs.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Idk man solar might be better but the corn sounds a lot funnier.
I'm surprised that the difference is apparently that low considering the efficiency of photosynthesis vs the photovoltaic effect, the fact that not all of the plant gets turned into ethanol, and the efficiency of the combustion process.
Ha? The tv comedy network?
We've got to strengthen our knees!
But you can't pour solar panels into a fuel tank. What liquid biofuels are good for is stuff you can't electrify, like aviation and shipping.
Sure, but the context is that the US dedicates almost half its corn crop to ethanol that's blended with gasoline. Vehicle electrification + solar panels will free up a huge amount of agricultural land.
Corn gets a ton of subsidized funding, it sure would be nice if all that funding went to green energy instead.
I mean if you think about it, what is a corn field but a really shitty solar panel?
To be fair, cornfields consume resources other than solar energy. Like CO2. However the benefits of consuming CO2 goes away if you're just gonna burn the corn, which releases CO2 again.
Also the costs of planting corn, protecting it, the emissions from equipment used to harvest, transport, and manufacture, and the amount of water needed to make it all happen, it's extremely inefficient. Solar panels are just there. It's not always simple to set them up, and the up front cost might be high, but the long-term benefit far outweighs the cost of corn.
Which is why I said "shitty" solar panel specifically!
Solar panels dont produce fuel for thermal engines and are intermittent. In the longer term we want electric vehicles and batterie to absorb intermittence but in the short term it has its uses
Yeah, I dont think we'll ever be in a place where we don't want to be producing some combustible fuel. We can electrify a whole lot of things, but it's hard to beat the energy density of stuff you can burn.