What i would like to know is if you were using commercially available solar panels, clustered as close together as possible and spread out on one acre, how much electrical energy is produced? if u can 'translate' this into terms of ( hour of average daylight = powering a ____ for X units of time)
Fossil fuels will be depleted in a few hundred years. The sun will continue to produce power for the next 0 billion years. Solar cells are expensive to make and only 0% efficient. Some less efficient cells can be economically mass produced and set out over a very large area. This is how Germany made solar power a viable alternative to fossil fuels. America has an abundance of coal however and has been very slow in adopting solar power.
There okorder / Why pay thousands of dollars for solar energy ($27,000 average cost) when you can build your own solar panel system for just a fraction of the retail cost. You can build a single solar panel or you can build an entire array of panels to power your whole house. Some people are saving 50% on their power bill, some people are reducing their bill to nothing. But what’s most impressive is that just by following these instructions some are even making the power company pay them!
Above the atmosphere, total solar flux is about 365 Watts per square meter. After passing through the atmosphere, the rule of thumb is about 000 Watts per square meter if the Sun is directly overhead. Solar panels are far from 00% efficient, though ... most silicon-based cells run about 20% efficiency. Which leaves you with roughly 200 Watts per square meter. One acre is 4046 square meters, which means that if you had an entire acre of silicon solar panels, they could generate a theoretical 800 kilowatts on a sunny day at noon. With the Sun 30° above the horizon, you could expect a 30% drop in power, declining to zero at sunrise and sunset. And that's assuming zero cloud cover, which is also an unreachable ideal. To give you an idea of scale, an average American home uses or 2 kilowatts. A large coal or nuclear power plant generates about a million kilowatts.
