Average continuous POWER level of all solar facilities in the United States in 2008.

[NNadir]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html">In 2008, the United States generated and consumed 4,110,259 thousand MEGAwatt-hours of electricity.

Note that a MEGAwatt-hour is a unit of energy, since power multiplied by a time unit (in this case an hour) gives energy. The standard unit of energy is the joule, and it can thus be shown that this amount of electricity is 4,110,259 X 10⁶ (for the MEGA) X 3600 seconds/hour X 1000 = 1.48 X 10¹⁹ joules of electricity or 14.8 exajoules.

There are 3600 seconds in an hour and 24 hours in a day and 365.25 days in a year, meaning that a year has 31,557,600 seconds in it. Thus, since power is energy/time, the average continuous power demand of the United States in 2008 was 1.48 X 10¹⁹ joules/31,557,600 seconds = 4.69 X 10¹¹ watts or 469,000 MEGAwatts.

The renewable energy industry produced http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/table3.html">371,688,391 thousand KILOwatt-hours of electricity in 2008. Of this, more than half, 248,085,084 KILOwatt-hours was produced by old fashioned hydroelectricity.

The reason that I have capitalized the prefixes KILO and MEGA is not because it is standard practice, but because - and I believe this is more or less deliberate - the sloppy and inconsistent use of these prefixes, kilo and mega, is designed to make the renewable industry seem more significant than it actually is, so that we can all wallow and wallow and wallow and wallow in consumerist self-rationalization and to put it more bluntly, denial.

No, denial is NOT a river in Egypt.

The solar industry, even compared with the combined so called "renewable industry" as a whole produced 843,054 KILOwatt-hours, or, in "percent talk" 0.2% of the renewable portion of US energy demand, and 0.02% of total US electricity demand.

From these figures we can see what the total average power production of all solar facilities in the United States was last year, 54 years after the invention of the solar cell, and 32 years after Amory Lovins confidently predicted that solar electricity would save us.

The total energy produced by solar energy was 843,054 * 1000 watts/kilowatt * 3600 = 3.03 X 10¹⁵ joules.

Dividing this last number by the number of seconds in a year we find that solar electricity's average continuous power generation amounted to 96,173,000 watts or 96.1 MEGAwatts.

How much power is this? For perspective, for those who have visited the Los Angeles area and the beach city of Redondo Beach, there is a power plant on that beach. One can bicycle past the plant - I did this many times - in less than 3 minutes.

Each of the largest two turbines on the plant property produce 480 Megawatts of power, or roughly 5 times as much electricity as all of the solar facilities in the United States, each.

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssUtilitiesMultiline/idUSN1339286420090414

The Redondo Power plants, by the way, are powered by dangerous natural gas. The plants are not designed to contain the dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide, on the plant grounds, nor to capture it in any way or store it any way. All of the dangerous fossil fuel waste generated by these plants is indiscriminately dumped into Earth's atmosphere, where it is piling up (with the waste of thousands of similar plants around the world) and doing significant damage to the ecosphere of the entire planet.

I favor phasing out and banning dangerous natural gas use, by the way, whereas the solar industry - which also has no plans to dispose of its electronic and chemical waste eternally - couldn't care less about dangerous natural gas. In fact several Southern California solar thermal plants, notably the infamous plants built by the now bankrupt LUZ corporation, are actually cofired with dangerous natural gas.

It is very clear therefore that the chance of the solar industry, despite 54 years of endless hype, has no hope of phasing out dangerous natural gas, never mind coal and oil.