Here's a little idea I though might help everyone out in Iraq a little: How about if the US mass produces solar panels that are small enough to carry (maybe one foot by three feet) that have a regular power outlet on them to the Iraqis? We could send convoys to the people waiting in line to buy gas and give each person one free solar panel. Why?. A lot of people are buying gas to run generators for air conditioning, not to fuel vehicles. 2. It would help reduce the gas lines if people only needed gas for cars instead of their generators too.3. It would help reduce the fighting over the power grid if people didn't need the grid for their own electrical power.My theory is, once every family in Iraq has enough of these panels that they don't even care about the power grid (during the daytime anyway) it would be much easier to fix the power grid. Maybe these solar panels could even connect to and add to the power grid.
The power we get from sun's radiation is limited by the area we receive sunshine. One square meter will have kW power from sun's radiation. For current technology, the conversion efficiency is about 8%. So one foot by three foot of solar panel only produce 80Watt. This will not be enough for your application.
In oil rich Iraq it would be counter productive to take such an initiative. There is already a huge shortage of solar panels. If you drive the price up more, which you're plan would do, It would just set back their growth in the U.S. and other developed oil poor places. This would hurt us a lot more than it would help them.
I will answer your question with a question. Why does everyone try so hard to point out why they think (I did say think and they are normally wrong) something will not work. I agree with your idea but you are wanting to put the help or money in the wrong place. If we would just take care of our own here at home. We would not need their oil so they would have more for their own use. This would aswell stop our money from leaving our country and they would NOT beable to use our money to build bombs to kill us with. So just by taking care of ourselfs we would be helping Iraq and our own country. We would not need their oil and they would get what they want. Us out of their country. However, That will not help bush and his OIL millionaire friends so it will never happen.
A big problem with your theory is that because the solar panel is so small the amount of energy gathered from it would be small and probably wouldnt be able to provide electricity for things and even if it did it wouldn't last very long. its a good idea but it just won't work. in order to produce the amount of energy your talking about the solar panels would have to be the size of a roof and be placed on the rooftop or a hill or something. people wuldnt be able to carry that around.
I have a better idea . Why don't we pull our troops out of there and take the money that we spend to kill people and build a mass amount of solar cells and hand them out to our own people maybe give one of our hungry people a little food to go with it . You could even take a little of that money and put some kids through college . I can think of thousands of things to do with that cash . Why don't we ever take care of our own people first ?
