PV Gap

Beth Said:

Compare the energy consumption in Joules per year (J/Y), as fuel and solar radiation for the State of Kuwait.?

We Answered:

IS THIS someones homework?

Toni Said:

Effects on environment with the consumption of solar energy?

We Answered:

Your trying to apply 1 of Newton's laws of motion to the end of a ray of sunshine. For what? by the time the sunshine hits your solar panel it's already done it's work of what ever you say is was going to do. Now it can either warm and age your asphalt roofing or be absorbed into the solar panel and starting a whole new chain of events. Solar energy is only practical on the individual level. So buy an RV load it up with solar cells and live off the grid, you did your part. Why do so many people feel soo important that they actually believe that they could influence the environment. We couldn't change the environment if we wanted to. Our Co2 production is one tenth of what insects produce.

Sara Said:

Light energy from the sun in one day is equivalent to our total energy consumption in how many days?

We Answered:

From the Wiki linked below the quote:

The 89 petawatts of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is plentiful - almost 6,000 times more - compared to the 15 terawatts of average power consumed by humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power

[added] Meaning that enough sunlight falls on the earth per day to power the planet for 16.47 years.

A petawatt is 1 quadrillion, or 10 to the 15th power.
A terawatt is 10 to the 12th power of watts, or 1/1,000ths of a petawatt.

World energy consumption is expected to grow quite a bit between now and 2020. Almost 30% by the looks of the graph here:
http://carto.eu.org/article2489.html

Not quite on topic, but interesting (to me,anyways): the total energy production of the sun, radiating in all directions, is said to be "3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion megawatts"..that's per second. Some of that is reabsorbed by the sun, but the energy flow into space is still staggering.
http://www.nineplanets.org/sol.html