Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter.
And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc).
That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)
If we could use the concept of space elevators and instead floated solar "panels" in the sky we could achieve two things, unimpeded surface area for installation and second a sunshield to cool things off a bit and forestall climatologically induced planetary change.
Yes, although one wonders what the impact might be on ecosystems with less energy coming in (even if we limited the sunshields to underproductive polar regions).
Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter.
And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc).
That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)