Do solar power plants require considerable space and plenty of sunshine to function correctly?
Question:
Answer:
Esentially, yes.
You need space, because the current is proportional to the area covered(which is proportional to the energy it receives => more area = more current).
And the more sunshine, the more energy you can gather.
Since production of solar panels is still expensive, you want to place them somewhere with a lot of sunshine.
Yes but we have plenty of space to build them.
Something like seven square kilometers of solar panels would produce power comparable to a typical nuclear power plant (one gigawatt).
Yes they do. The energy of sunlight is not very concentrated - only about 1000 Watts per square meter. Also methods of converting this energy to electricity are only 20% - 50% efficient. Clouds and the angle of the sunlight can also decrease values.
For large scale power production, you would need to produce about 100 Megawatts (100,000,000 Watts).
For photovoltaic cells this would require about 124 acres under good conditions. For thermal systems, this would require about 50 acres.
Solar is a better choice for smaller scale power production such as roof tops of houses and buildings.
The biggest problem with solar electricity is that most electricity is consumed at night - when it is dark. And there is no effective way to store electricity at present (there are one or two pumped storage schemes, but nothing close to what would be required to make solar viable).
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