If the U.S. had decided to buy solar cells instead of invading Iraq. How much electricity could we be making? I understand that there is no hard answer to this question but thought I could estimate it to within an order of magnitude. I came up with 35% of the total U.S. generation capacity!:eek:
The logic behind my estimate is below. What figures do my highly intelligent and uncritical dopers come up with?
Disclaimer: IANA-Engineer, IANA-Economist.
if estimated solar cell cost per Kilowatt hour = 25 cents ( 0.25 dollars )
Then kWh per $1 billion dollars spent = 4*10^9.
Big number! To put it in perspective compare it to total generation capacity of U.S.
Roughly 4*10^9 Megawatt hours.
convert solar cell kWh/billion$ to mWh/ billion$ gives 4*10^6 mWh/billion$
fraction of U.S. electric capacity provided per billion$ 1/1000 or 0.001 or 0.1%
Estimated cost of the war up to now 350 billion dollars
350 Billion$ * cost per 0.1% of U.S. Capacity = 35% of Total U.S. electric capacity.
I don’t know where you’re getting your numbers, but they don’t measure what you think they measure. Generating capability is power, and is measured in watts or kilowatts, not watt-hours or kilowatt-hours. Those are units of energy. So, for instance, a 1 kilowatt generator (of whatever sort; solar panel or coal turbine or whatever) can keep ten 100-watt light bulbs burning. If you run the generator for an hour, you’ll generate 1 kilowatt-hour of energy, and keep those bulbs burning for one hour. If you run the generator for ten hours, then you generate ten kWhr of energy, enough to light the bulbs for ten hours, and so on.
You can get a price for solar cells per kilowatt-hour, but that requires some knowledge of the lifespan of the cell (since they longer it lasts, the more energy it’ll produce, but the costs are basically all paid up front regardless). The much more straightforward figure for a solar cell is the cost per kilowatt.
Well, let’s redo that back-of-the-envelope calculation for the hell of it. According to this site, solar panels cost $4.86 per watt. Call that $5/watt to make it easy.
So, instead of going to Iraq, we (theoretically) could have built 70 GW worth of solar plants.
To put that in context, total US generating capacity is about 1,000 GW. Peak demand is something like 700 GW. Still, 70 GW is a rather significant chunk of power, and I completely agree with you that solar plants would have been a better way to spend the money.
Of course, in my alternative-reality pipe dream, most of that money shouldn’t have been spent (since it pretty much is all borrowed). And instead of building lots of power plants using current and expensive technology, I would have put several billion towards alternative energy research and development.
Many experts would say you are considerably underestimating the cost of the war, The linked story quotes what* will *be spent adding up to as much as 2 trillion, and at least 400 billion to date. I have come across several other to-date estimates in the neighborhood of 1 trillion.
I’d say you can afford 2 or 3 times the number of cells as you thought you can.
Those numbers are measuring economic impact, not government spending. For example, in compiling his $1 trillion figure, Nordhaus included things like an estimated rise in the price of gasoline. That is indeed an economic cost borne by our country, but it is not a cost paid for out of government coffers (excluding the jet fuel used by F-18s, etc). If you include the money that’s being argued about between the White House and Congress, direct government spending on the war in Iraq (not including Afghanistan or homeland defense costs) will soon be in the range of $450 billion, plus lots of unknown future liabilities (like veterans health care, etc).
Also, in thinking about solar panels, if we poured that much money into building a technology, it would become progressively cheaper and cheaper as a result of economies of scale. And of course, it would take a long time to build that many solar panels because we don’t have the industrial capacity. IANAE, but if we could have built 70 GW of panels at today’s prices for $350 billion, I could easily see these efficiencies actually leading to 100, 120, hell, maybe even 200-plus GW of panels over the next decade with that same $350 billion.
Sure, we could have bought all those solar cells, but where would we have put them? That many would need a lot of room and we’d want them someplace nice and sunny so we’d get our money’s worth out of them. So we’d have probably ended up invading Iraq anyway. And then where would we be? $350,000,000,000 for solar cells and $350,000,000,000 for a war on top of that.
That would be maybe 5 or 10 people tops going on a trip that contains literally nothing for most of the way and few real sites once they are there. Hundreds of thousands of Americans got to visit the area that contains the cradle of civilization and a modern-day living museum specializing in religious and cultural diversity. I think that is a much better use of a dollar.
THe big price for any endevor is most often going to be the land, installation, and upkeep. Without adding those in, none of this really means anything.
And overall you’d still probably be better making some nuclear power plants, and running an ad campaign to get people to move to hybrid cars.
Solar powerplants? Solar powerplants?! Are you freaking kidding me? We’re talking about 70 gigawatts here. At one point twenty-one gigawatts a trip, we could have gone back and forth in time 28 times, with enough power left over to send Marty to the past and return 80% of him. (The non-twitchy part, if you please.)
IIRC, it’d take something like 100 square miles of desert covered in solar cells to provide enough juice to power the US. I’ll WAG that Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, or Utah could lose that much real estate without too many people noticing.
A) Cite?
B) Even assuming the government has that much land to just start using, no species will be endangered, the land won’t be flooded once a year, etc. How much are the installation and upkeep costs?
The number’s given in this NPR story. You’ll have to listen to the audio to hear the exact figure. As for the upkeep costs, I’ve no idea, and something like 80% of the land in Utah is Federally owned, plus the government has the power of eminent domain, so they can just boot out anyone they like, if they don’t happen to have enough land.
Bear in mind 100 square miles is a square 10 miles by 10 miles. In other words, a small ranch in Australia, or a big one in Texas. We’re not talking “cover all of Arizona” here.
I agree costs for maintenance infrastructure, etc, are non-trivial.