PV Gap

Elsie Said:

Since stuff could be solar powered...?

We Answered:

The Moon does not shine with any significant amount of light of its own. It only shines because it is reflecting light from the Sun, and the amount that it reflects is far, far smaller than the amount we can get from the Sun directly. In fact, the density of the light reaching the Earth from the Sun is about 400000 (four hundred thousand) times higher than that from the full Moon. To put this into perspective, not counting collector inefficiency and atmospheric effects, in order to power a typical desktop PC on solar panels exposed to direct sunlight you would need a square solar panel about 40 centimeters on each side. To power it on moonlight, you would need a square collector 240 meters on each side. That's 14 acres of collectors. Now, the average person in Japan used about 8459kWh of energy in 2004, and its population currently stands at about 127 million. That comes to an average of 965 watts per capita, or 122.6 billion watts for the entire country, which on moonlight would require 36 million square kilometers of collectors, or almost 100 times the total land area of the country. So you can see why powering things on moonlight is just not feasible.