The contrarian is just that a blowhard contrarian.
Here someone did the actual math for him. NYC could easily export energy even in winter time with modern thin film solar panels just on the roofs of existing buildings and parking decks. Yes every one knows the sun doesn’t shine at night that’s not the point. Every watt generated is a what you don’t have to burn natural gas for or spin Hydro turbines in Canada. Saving those resources for another day or for better use like plastics,fertilizers or medications. Every chemical engineer screams in pain when they see valuable natural gas being burnt for power, it used to be illegal and for good reasons.
https://x.com/JessePeltan/status/1918722555126382727
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Jesse Peltan
@JessePeltan
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May 3
How much of NYC would you need to cover in solar panels to turn it into a net exporter of electricity?
NYC uses about 50 TWh of electricity per year.
NYC has ~780 square kilometers of land area, and a GHI of 4 kWh/m^2/day, giving a primary solar resource of ~1,100 TWh/year - more than 20x electricity demand.
Let’s assume we only place panels over existing impervious surfaces on buildings and parking lots.
(the impervious part of the first 45.5%)
That brings our area to 261 sq km and our solar resource to 380 TWh/year.
With 23% efficient panels and 14% system losses (for dust, inverter losses, etc.) we get 75 TWh/year.
We would need to cover ~2/3 of the impervious surfaces in the “buildings & lots” category to generate as much electricity as NYC consumes.
This leaves open all existing sidewalks, streets, parks, vacant land, airports, etc. and doesn’t include any vertical surfaces which could allow for capture of a larger fraction of NYC’s primary solar resource.
The power density of solar PV is high enough to turn the densest city in the U.S. into an exporter of electricity.]
Winter is not an issue any more with vertical thin film , think South facing building walls.
https://x.com/JessePeltan/status/1919427851129860183
[A south facing vertical solar panel in NYC would generate 3/4 as much electricity as a horizontal panel over the course of a year, but 1.8 times as much in December and January.
There’s still plenty of sunlight during the winter in New York, but the Sun is lower in the sky.
Winter is not an issue for solar in the U.S. the way it is in Northern Europe.
New York City is further south than Barcelona, Spain.]
Actual math and real science. The numbers speak for themselves everything else is opinions, feelings and beliefs, in other words irrelevant.
As least frame a argument from quantifiable facts.
There seems to be a problem with your arguement:
“Every watt generated is a what you don’t have to burn natural gas for or spin Hydro turbines in Canada.”
Manhattan Contrarian goes to great lengths to explain why this concept is a false argument. Watts generated by solar cannot just supplant other sources, because they cannot deliver the energy when needed.
Secondly, these calculations don't tell us the cost of constructing this alleged energy utopia, the cost of maintenance, and the cost per KW for individuals which is going to higher than any electricity production we have ever experienced and I have no doubt will continue to increase over time.
Mr. Peltan sounds like one of the people advising the NYS legislature about how simple, easy, and straightforward this transition to all electric will supposedly be. 'All we do is have the resolve to go all electric and everything will fall into place! Believing is achieving!'
That's not how the real world works.