eli5: Why do we not run heavily on solar energy as a society or at least in sunny places?
In: 8
You cannot look at Solar power in a vacuum. You need to compare it to the current market standard, condensed into the following 3 key factors.
1. Space
2. Efficiency
3. Reliability/Consistency
There are (many) more factors at play, but for the purpose of this response I’ll stick to these 3 points.
Solar farms take up a lot of space. The space required can be difficult to obtain & maintain, especially if you’re trying to provide power for a city, let alone a nation. Space is a premium for many nations, and Conventional natural gas/coal/nuclear power take a portion of the space required for significantly higher output.
This ties into the 2nd point – efficiency. Solar energy, with the current technology available to us, is not nearly as efficient as simply burning fossil fuels. What this means is that you will require a lot more infrastructure & land (space) dedicated to solar power to get the same result.
Lastly, Reliability & Consistency. Contrary to what how media tries to portray power storage, we have been unable to efficiently ‘store’ energy. It’s not as simple as building a gigantic battery to store power for later – power today is generated and used as-is, meaning all excess power created is wasted. This bit is slightly too complicated to go into detail, but basically we cannot ‘store’ energy for use later on. Keep in mind we’re talking about at least city-level power consumption here, and not mobile devices.
The previous point is important, because we use power 24/7. As you can tell, solar power simply doesn’t work for around half that time. Now factor in weather considerations (e.g. rain, cloudy weather, haze conditions, etc.) and you see that solar power lacks the reliability of conventional power sources.
Conventional power plants can simply increase the power output in a variety of ways on demand. Unfortunately, we lack the ability to summon the Sun on demand, so if a Solar power plant is not generating enough power, there is quite literally nothing the team can do to increase output.
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