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
Most of these claims that if you paved for instance an area the size of the state of Texas with solar panels you would power the world are outright lies. I know of one such claim on an university website that used peak solar radiation, 100% conversion efficiency, and misrepresented the world’s power demand to make such a claim. That doesn’t mean that desert solar isn’t a good idea.
They could easily just run power lines to local cities for use but the whole thing is expensive and they’d rather save their budget for giving out bullshit contracts to their friends
Even if he could make that many batteries easily and cheaply and pollutionless, transporting them would cost energy. Either electrical energie, or fossil fuel, in order to move the batteries. And charging and discharging a battery would damage it with time.
It would be much cheaper to build land lines. You would only need to build them once and occasionally repair them. But you don’t need to store energy, discharge energy, and losses over thousands of km of landlines are not that much.
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