Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar tower for AZ

Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by ianterrell on Sunday July 24, 2011 @11:16PM (#2801163)

The Census says there are 110,692,000 occupied homes in the US, so 150k is 0.136% of that.[1] That means that there would need to be 738 of them to meet demand.

Now, the EIA says there are about 5700 power plants currently operating in the US [2]. Continuing with the back of the envelope math, that's almost 8 times as many as would be necessary if they all produced as much as this one. Pick whatever factor you want for "non-home" energy, but we're dealing with the right order of magnitude.

Combine that with the clean energy aspect of it, and I don't see a lot of reason to be cynical.

[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html [2] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=65&t=2

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Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by estel on Monday July 25, 2011 @05:41AM (#2801954)

The other aspect you're missing is the probably somewhat larger energy consumption from non-residential properties.

Wikipedia [1] says that the energy consumption of the US is 25,000 TWh per annum. Looking at the top rated comment and picking instead a CF between the two (I used 0.6); we're looking at this tower producing in the region of 1TWh.

So you'd actually need about 25,000 of these towers to provide for the energy requirements of the US. Ouch.

Edit: obviously, this is for the complete replacement of all existing energy use with clean renewable electricity. The gross US electricity production is given [2] as 4344 TWh (2008).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unite...

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Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by tedkimble on Monday July 25, 2011 @01:13AM (#2801438)

So at $750 million a pop, that's a little over $550 billion to power US homes. Or, roughly 50% of the annual budget of the military to power all US homes for 80 years!

Clearly back of the envelope numbers, but definitely something to be excited about.

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Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by ahlatimer on Monday July 25, 2011 @02:23AM (#2801588)

Well, you can't only have these things powering US homes because I can't imagine they work that well at night.

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Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by erikpukinskis on Monday July 25, 2011 @04:03AM (#2801775)

They do actually.

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Re:Twice the height of the Empire State - massive solar towe... by savramescu on Monday July 25, 2011 @05:32AM (#2801934)

Truth be told, the article doesn't say how well they work at night. I don't think that it'll work just as good, but that doesn't mean it won't work at all.

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