Originally Posted by corrado33

I'm sorry but you really need a reality check. I work in the energy field. There is no way we (as in the US) have enough room for a country powered by solar, wind, hydroelectric. It's simply not possible. Sure, there are articles out there that say "well if we can up the efficiency of solar panels by X% we can power the entire country just by covering new jersey in solar panels." But that efficiency gain is next to impossible with today's technology. In a few decades... maybe.

Let's do some math. In the US in 2014 we used roughly 40 quadrillion BTU of energy to produce electricity. That's about 12 trillion kWh. If a wind farm can produce 3 W/m^2 (the max of UK wind farms, where it's MUCH more windy), it'd take roughly 62 MILLION square miles of wind farms to power the US. Oh, the US is only 3.8 million square miles large. (That includes Alaska...) Oh, and I also assumed that the wind farms are producing their 3 W/m^2 all 24 hours in a day.

Ok, fine, wind isn't that great of a power source. What about solar? Solar farms can produce a bit less than 200 W/m^2 (I'm being generous). Even at that energy density, it'd take ~ 1.9 MILLION square miles of solar panels to power the US. So, you know, a bit less than 2/3rds of the US. Again, I assumed that the solar panels were producing max power for 12 hours every day. I'm not even going to talk about cloudy days, or how the majority of the US isn't suited for solar panels, or how we can't store energy well so if we had a solar panel based power generation system we'd have no electricity at night, or how electricity transmission is very lossy, especially since we'd have to convert the DC into AC to transmit it (DC has historically been difficult to transmit over long distances due to the difficulty of converting it to higher voltage. Transformers make this easy.) so that's even more lossy. Etc. etc. etc.

Please note that I've only talking about ELECTRICITY here. While the production of electricity does take a lot of energy, it's not the only thing that NEEDS energy in the US. The US, in total, used about 85 quadrillion BTU of energy. Now, you can discount the losses associated with the production of electricity if you want for these calculations, but you'd still have to produce electricity for everything else in the US that doesn't currently use it. Cars, jets, etc.

As for oil and coal being non-renewable, I look at it this way. When I started my PhD 4 years ago, I looked up the reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas for the US. IIRC, it was about 30 years for oil, 100 years for coal, and 200 years for natural gas. (I may have the coal and natural gas switched.) When I updated my presentation a year ago, those numbers had vastly changed. Oil was about 100 years, coal and natural gas were both well above 200 years. These numbers aren't going down any time soon. (All of these numbers were straight from the department of energy.) So yes, these resources are NOT renewable, but they are also not going to run out any time soon. By the time they run out we will have much better technology and may actually be able to use solar effectively.

What we SHOULD be focused on is better ways to USE fossil fuels more efficiently and produce LESS emissions. Something like a fuel cell for example. (My research project.)

Apologies for derailing the thread. I get uppity when people say that the US should try to stop using fossil fuels or anything similar. Too much misinformation spread on the internet.