“Solar energy is the greatest thing in the world. It’s cheap, clean and can make you tons of money! The only reason America doesn’t run completely on solar is a corporate conspiracy spearheaded by big oil.”
If you believe any of the above statements, you probably won’t like what comes next.
The obvious truth is that the American fuel industry has more than enough money to convert their productions to a more efficient alternative if one exists. The fact that they stick with oil, gas and coal should already be telling, but we’ll go ahead and take a minute to tackle solar power. In a few minutes, you’ll understand the primary reasons why we don’t run on solar.
Reliability
Let’s start with the obvious. There’s no sunlight at night, which means that solar production is zero for at least half the time. When you add the variability of weather, the effective time window for solar shrinks even smaller.
In the U.S., this is the largest barrier to wide-scale solar usage. More than half the country’s population lives in regions that are known for long and cold weather. You see, when a layer of frost builds up on a solar panel, it impedes the absorption of sunlight. Thick layers of frost or snow cut solar production down to nothing. With the majority of Americans living in regions that produce regular frost for six or more months a year, it’s easy to see the biggest barrier of adoption.
There are some countermeasures to dealing with frost, but they have major drawbacks. You can heat the solar panels, but in sustained cold weather, it takes more energy to continuously defrost a panel than it can produce.
The other obvious solution is to bulk up on solar farms in sunny regions and just pipe electricity via power lines. This also isn’t realistic, since the maximum effective range of standard power lines is in the ballpark of 300 miles. If you’re shipping electricity farther than that, you lose too much energy from the process. This is why New York City doesn’t get power from the Hoover Dam.
Batteries
Since it’s clear that solar panels can’t produce power around the clock like traditional fuels, using solar requires a different approach. The general idea is to run the panels at full capacity whenever you can and charge enough batteries to keep the lights on until the sun is back up. Again, this is a simplistic view, so we’ll destroy the notion with a little math.
The largest battery system in the world is in Japan, and it can store a whopping 40,000 KWh. This is roughly enough energy to provide power to 80,000 people for a whole day. When you scale that up to the needs of the entire country, the problem is quickly apparent.
To get the country through a single night, we would need battery systems 275 times greater than what currently exists on the planet, and that doesn’t even try to account for bad weather or other regular problems with solar productivity.
Cost
Finally, we come to the issue you’ve probably heard – Solar power isn’t cost effective. At its absolute best, it costs a little more than twice as much to produce solar power than to use fossil fuels.
Trying to force the bottom income quintiles to pay two to three times as much for their basic electricity needs is an impossibility for the country’s current state. We can’t paint this picture a little more clearly. Even when including subsidies, there have so far been only two instances in human history where extended solar grids did not lose money. Neither instance lasted for a full 24 hours.
The long and short of it is that solar power costs too much money, and forcing its adoption would bankrupt millions of Americans and generate an unnecessary struggle to survive the often harsh winters our country regularly sees.
Going Green
There is no question that each method of generating electricity comes with drawbacks. Fossil fuels produce airborne toxins, dams threaten devastating floods when they have structural problems and nuclear is its own can of worms.
If you want to support clean forms of energy, your only hope is to have an honest discussion about the real costs of each method. While solar power is great in terms of toxicity, it’s problems with reliability and cost are dangerous.
It’s easy to forget how important electricity is while you have it, but as it stands, an American solar conversion would cause the deaths of millions of Americans from cold and hunger. That alone is why we don’t rely on it.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
