{"id":38433,"date":"2018-09-28T09:08:59","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T14:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38433"},"modified":"2018-09-28T09:08:59","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T14:08:59","slug":"the-amazing-amount-of-solar-power-needed-to-run-the-u-s-transportation-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38433","title":{"rendered":"The Amazing Amount Of Solar Power Needed To Run The U.S. Transportation Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Amazing Amount Of Solar Power Needed To Run The U.S. Transportation Sector<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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The U.S. Solar PV Industry will never be able to grow large enough to power the transportation industry.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the amount of energy needed is well beyond the forecasted growth of U.S. solar power generation.\u00a0 And, it\u2019s even worse than that.\u00a0 Industry analysts are making their forecasts based on rising fossil fuel production\u2026 the critical energy necessary to manufacture and build solar power plants.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s desire.\u00a0 It seems as if no one takes the time to do a bit of simple math.\u00a0 While U.S. solar power generation has increased significantly over the past several years, it is still a fraction of the total energy supplied.<\/p>\n

For example, U.S. fossil fuel production (coal, natural gas, and oil) still supplies 88 times more energy than solar PV power.\u00a0 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<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

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According to the EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, total U.S. solar power generation in 2017 was 0.77 Quadrillion BTU\u2019s versus 29.5 Quad BTU\u2019s consumed by the entire domestic transportation sector\u2026 cars, buses, trucks, and trains.\u00a0 To give you an idea of how much 1 Quad BTU equals, it represents the energy in 170 million barrels of oil.\u00a0 Thus, the U.S. transportation sector consumes 29.5 times that amount or roughly 5 billion barrels of oil per year.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Amazing Amount Of Solar Power Needed To Run The U.S. Transportation Sector The U.S. Solar PV Industry will never be able to grow large enough to power the transportation industry.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the amount of energy needed is well beyond the forecasted growth of U.S. solar power generation.\u00a0 And, it\u2019s even worse than that.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1859,21985,12073,827,21984],"class_list":["post-38433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-solar-power","tag-solar-pv-industry","tag-srsrocco-report","tag-united-states","tag-us-transportation-sector"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38433"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38434,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38433\/revisions\/38434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}