Driving On Sunshine — School Documentary By: George E. Totolos – YouTube

Driving On Sunshine — School Documentary By: George E. Totolos – YouTube.

One of the myths about solar energy is that it only works in the South Western United States and that power lines would have to be built to send this power to the  rest of the country.  As this video shows, this is not the case at all.  In fact Germany, which makes more solar power than any other country, gets less solar energy per square meter than Seattle, WA.  This means that the rest of the U.S. gets more solar energy per square meter than Germany.  Germany makes 43% of all the solar energy in the world and is only about the size of the state of Montana.  Just think of the how much solar power could be made across the U.S. on the roof tops of businesses and homes.  One advantage of this distributed solar power production is that the electricity is being made right where it’s being used so that there is no loss of power in transmission lines.

Also as pointed out in the this video, the pay back period for a solar power system is much faster when the electricity is used in an electric car to replace gasoline in an internal combustion engine car.  This is because an electric car is five times more efficient than an internal combustion  engine car.  This is explained in the  Photovoltaic Solar Energy and Electric Vehicles versus Internal-Combustion-Engine Vehicles paper.