Agreed, the 10% seems like a solid estimate, at least for today, but it seems quite likely that new tech could bring that up to 15% or more, which is a 50% in efficacy. Wikipedia says that current panels are getting a 10% capacity factor now, which is only 40% - 50% of what can be had at sites with good solar. That capacity factor seems to be slowly climbing since 2008 as well.
This paragraph has some pretty bad predictions by MacKay though:
>The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh
per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics
in the whole world.
This is a completely irrelevant and pointless thing to state.
> At the start of this book I said I
wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sus-
tainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should
certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm
onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what
we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from
solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate.
Overlooking that Solar PV had already fallen precipitously in cost in 2008, and assuming that a four-fold fall was not a given, was a huge mistake.
> So I feel
a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production
stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond
the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated
doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in
a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power
lines.
5% of the UK is about the same percentage of the UK that is occupied by houses and gardens. Putting solar panels on all roofs could probably get to 10 kWh/d or more. Converting only a very small amount of arable land, which has already been taken out of nature, to solar panels, could get the UK to 5% easily.
The skepticism of solar and embrace of tech like clean coal and nuclear were big misses here.
This paragraph has some pretty bad predictions by MacKay though:
>The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world.
This is a completely irrelevant and pointless thing to state.
> At the start of this book I said I wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sus- tainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate.
Overlooking that Solar PV had already fallen precipitously in cost in 2008, and assuming that a four-fold fall was not a given, was a huge mistake.
> So I feel a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power lines.
5% of the UK is about the same percentage of the UK that is occupied by houses and gardens. Putting solar panels on all roofs could probably get to 10 kWh/d or more. Converting only a very small amount of arable land, which has already been taken out of nature, to solar panels, could get the UK to 5% easily.
The skepticism of solar and embrace of tech like clean coal and nuclear were big misses here.