The U.S. Solar PV Industry will never be able to grow large enough to power the transportation industry. Why? Because the amount of energy needed is well beyond the forecasted growth of U.S. solar power generation. And, it’s even worse than that. Industry analysts are making their forecasts based on rising fossil fuel production… the critical energy necessary to manufacture and build solar power plants.
There seems to be this notion by Americans, that in the future, they will just plug in their electric cars and drive to their heart’s desire. It seems as if no one takes the time to do a bit of simple math. While U.S. solar power generation has increased significantly over the past several years, it is still a fraction of the total energy supplied.
For example, U.S. fossil fuel production (coal, natural gas, and oil) still supplies 88 times more energy than solar PV power. However, if we just focus on the U.S. solar power generation versus the transportation sector, it only amounts to 2.6% of the total:
According to the EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, total U.S. solar power generation in 2017 was 0.77 Quadrillion BTU’s versus 29.5 Quad BTU’s consumed by the entire domestic transportation sector… cars, buses, trucks, and trains. To give you an idea of how much 1 Quad BTU equals, it represents the energy in 170 million barrels of oil. Thus, the U.S. transportation sector consumes 29.5 times that amount or roughly 5 billion barrels of oil per year.
For the U.S. Solar Power Industry to increase in size to equal the same energy that is consumed by the transportation sector, it would need to grow by over 33 times. Now, I am just making some simple calculations here, but even with the optimistic projects in this renewable energy industry, solar would still only represent about 15% of the present transportation energy consumption by 2035:
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