HeyBub wrote:
It's not a crystal ball - it's math. The sunlight that falls on the earth is
745 watts/meter^2. At noon. On the equator. With no clouds. The only way to
increase that number is to move the orbit of the earth closer to the sun.

Assuming 50% efficiency, and accounting for latitude and weather, it would
take a solar collector the size of the Los Angeles basin to provide
California with the power the state now consumes (~50Gw). This would pretty
much render Los Angeles uninhabitable.

I'm not really sure why, just because it would need to be the size of
the Los Angeles Basin why it would need to actually be located there.

If you've ever drive along I-40 out of California towards Arizona (through
Needles, CA), you know that there's a whole lot of land out there which
is not being used for much and quite frankly doesn't look like it would
be good *for* much. And it's quite cheap too -- you can tell because
the billboards along that section of highway say so.

If we start with 745 watts/meter^2 and assume 98% of the energy is lost
due to weather, inefficiency of photovoltaics, transmission losses, etc.,
then that's still only about 1300 square miles of land area that would
be needed to meet California's power requirements. And California has
about 156,000 square miles of land, so that's less than 1% of the land.
It might seem crazy to cover 1% of the state's land area with solar
collectors, but my guess is that 1% of the state's land area is already
covered with asphalt or other road surface.

- Logan