Sunpower

SUNPOWER - We Do The Math (a three minute read)

The US uses 4 trillion kilowatts/yr. 4,000,000,000,000 KW/year, or 11,000,000,000 KW/day. There are peaks & troughs from day to day, but the maximum load days are in July when we have the most sunshine, so could reap the most power. Yes, I know there are cloudy days, but solar panels still work then (just not as well) & that's generally when the wind is up (which we will discuss another day after I've done more research).

Sunlight delivers over 5KW/square meter (thermal) on average in the American Southwest. 
11,000,000,000 ÷ 5 = 
  2,200,000,000 square meters of sunshine needed if solar cells were 100% efficient.

And, in 2026, it now outproduces coal power.

Inexpensive screen-printed solar cells are 19% efficient, (yes, there are panels with 34% efficiency & other tricks to boost efficiency even further) but those are brand new, so let's go with the off-the-shelf well-proven systems that cost 20 cents/watt, so we need 
  2,200,000,000 ÷ 19% = 
11,600,000,000 square meters, or (2,589,988 square meters per square mile)
4,479 square miles of standard solar cells.  

Let's increase coverage to compensate for the 60% efficiency of iron-air flow batteries (cheap, no heavy or exotic metals or lithium required) or the newer more efficient sodium-sulfur batteries (also no heavy or exotic metals, lithium-free) as used in German transformer stations to store some (not all) of that power for after sundown & unusual power use. Remember, our peak power need is when the sun's up, so we won't need those batteries all the time, so that 60% figure is very conservative & leaves a big margin.
4,479 square miles ÷ 60% = 
7,465 square miles.

Cover just 7% of the un-urban deserts of just one state of the union, New Mexico (109,000 rural square miles) with solar cells, elevated, so if there's water, you can grow & ranch beneath them. Solar arrays make great habitat for livestock like sheep & pollinators, too, as per this 2021 study, not to mention they're excellent in parking lots, as I saw when I worked at Intel which now has 3 million square feet of solar covered parking spaces.
109,000 X 7% =  7,630 square miles

Long distance DC power transmission loses only about 5% per thousand miles so add just a bit more, say 12%, to send some of that power as far away as Alaska or Maine. *
1.12 X 7,630 = 8,546 square miles.

Problem solved; all the electrical energy needs of the continental US plus Alaska solved using < 8 % of just one state's deserts, just like Heinlein wrote about in 1940. No need for methane-powered gas turbines that leak a greenhouse gas that's 84X as bad as CO2, extremely expensive nuclear plants, drilling for oil**, or the worst power option, coal. And this helps put the brakes on our undeniable Global Roasting†.

* (Hawaii, blessed with year-round sunshine, like the US island territories & possessions, can be self-sufficient with their own sunpower screens, batteries, & geothermal: No need for trans-Pacific or trans-Caribbean power cables, although we could do it with this plan if we needed to.)

** Our highly skilled oil drillers can transition to geothermal, as shown by this English success story which not only extracts heat and electrical power but lithium as well.

† Source: https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-may-2026

#SolarPower #SolarCells #Solar #FlowBatteries 

Short link to here tinyurl.com/sunpowerrr (yes, three r s in a row)