[GreenKeys] How much juice from a solar array?

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: tony.podrasky [tony.podrasky at gmail.com]  Sunday, September 18, 2016 12:13 PM
> I'd say the parking lot is equal to 2 football fields.
> Above the entire parking lot are huge solar panels.
> Does anyone have an idea what kind of power that can
> generate?

Guestimate  .5 KWH per square meter. per day.  Guestinmate a football field at 5000 square meters,  This gives one WalMart parking lot worth of solar cells as approximately 5000 KWH per day.

Given that an average US household uses just under 1000 KWH/month, this is enough to power about 150 houses -- assuming you can figure out how to store the excess daylight power in order to provide power on demand when the sun is down.  I guess you need to combine the solar cells with a pumped storage power plant or some such.  (Or just focus on ofsetting the air conditioning demand, which is mostly a daytime thing).

                Doug Jones
                jones at cs.uiowa.edu