I often see posted about how covering a relatively small area in a desert with solar panels could power the world – but transferring that energy is too difficult. Why can’t we just use that to charge batteries and ship them places/ everywhere?
In: Physics
Because we do not have enough batteries. The global consumption of electricity each day is kind of insane when you think about it. In 2022 the world used 25,500 tera-watt hours. That’s almost 70 tera-watt hours per day. A brand new Tesla Powerwall holds 13.5 kilo-watt hours. You’d need nearly 5.2 billion Powerwalls to store a single day’s power supply, assuming they are all operating at peak capacity.
Batteries also wear out, go bad, and lose capacity over time. It also takes time to ship items across the world. You’d be looking at probably needing 100+ billion Powerwall equivalent batteries to implement your idea, and that’s a conservative number. Taking into account needing batteries in use, in transit to/from, and being charged. You also need back up storages in each location in case a shipment is lost/damaged/delayed. And you need to be making more batteries to expand capacity, not just to replace ones that are no longer useable.
Any environmental benefit you gained from going solar would be offset from the massive mining operations needed to build all the batteries you are using to store the power. And all of the shipping efforts to transport them non-stop globally to feed the world’s power needs.
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