PV Gap

Ross Said:

How efficient is solar energy?

We Answered:

it depends mostly on where your using them, the only real problem with the two is that you really need battery technology to store the energy as its gathered, so that you can use it when you can't gather the energy.

Raul Said:

how efficient is solar energy compard to other energies?

We Answered:

There is no way in hell that we could ever use all the energy of the sun. There will always be trillions of gigawatts that any device we put in place will not capture.

Now if you are looking for percentage of incident radiation on the area of the collector, we get about 10% +/- 6%.

If you are going for percentage of rated capacity, on a 24 hour basis we get about 34% of rated capacity at best.

A gasoline or diesel engine can get close to 35% of the energy equivalent of the fuel, but may be able to deliver close to 70% of its rated maximum capacity on a sustained basis.

A nuclear rector may put out 100% of its rated capacity, but will derive only a small fraction of the amount of energy this amount of fuel could theoretically deliver, based on use in a fusion reactor.

Gas turbines may deliver 30 to 50% of the power the fuel should have, but a full 100% of rated capacity.

Thermal steam engines may give close to 50% of energy in the fuel and often exceed rated capacity.

Now, efficiency means different things, and we have great difficulty making fair comparisons, difficulty deciding what matters.