Reply #5: Dunno if there's enough sun for that...

[TreasonousBastard]

down there. :) Takes a lot of solar panels to create enough usable juice.

Before I start looking stuff up, I seem to remember that a single solar cell creates around a volt or so, so you've got to string a lot of them in parallel to get the 50,000 volts or so needed to transmit over long distances and create the amount of current needed. And you've got to convert the DC the cells create to AC. We're probably talking square miles of cell arrays to power a small city.

Technically not a problem, but it costs money, and every step in the process creates losses. Right now it's much cheaper per kilowatt produced to just expand a coal plant. Building a bunch of windmills is more expensive per megawatt produced, too, but not by nearly as much as solar panels.

Around here, it costs about 25-35,000 bucks or so to install solar panels for one house and the panels cover most of the roof. People do it because of huge rebates they get, but even with economies of scale, take that cost and size and think about what it would take to power a town.