eli5: Why do we not run heavily on solar energy as a society or at least in sunny places?
In: 8
In large scale, solar energy, at least photovoltaic systems, can only work as complement to other sources. You would need huge batteries to store all the energy from the day to use in the night. There are systems that use mirror to reflect the sun into a tower, that way you could store the energy in heat form, but I don’t know how efficient those systems are.
Besides that, photovoltaic were not very efficient untill recently
There’s the science reasons, hard to store energy, hard to transport to not sunny places, not as efficient.. and then there’s the society/economic/political reasons.. They’re kind of ugly (nimby), they compete with existing fuel industries, they’re expensive to install, unwilling to commit to the infrastructure investment…
**Current US usage**
Natural gas: 31.8%
Petroleum (crude oil and natural gas plant liquids): 28%
Coal: 17.8%
Renewable energy: 12.7%
Nuclear electric power: 9.6%”
[https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/what-are-major-sources-and-users-energy-united-states](https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/what-are-major-sources-and-users-energy-united-states)
The big question is, would a massive shift to solar energy ultimately be a good thing? And if so at what cost?
When you flip the switch, you expect the light to turn on. Any time of day or night, the power is there, just waiting for you to flip that switch on.
Now imagine the power only works from maybe 10am to 2 pm. That’s solar power.
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