Mexico can grow & prosper with solar energy!...

Today’s post: Wednesday, 11-5-2008

As I’ve already posted about in this blog before, the Southwestern United States including parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Western part of Texas have very large potential for generating solar energy -- including the solar thermal farms built by companies such as Ausra that I posted on last week.

And, since this area borders all of Northern Mexico, particularly including Baja California and many U.S. companies already have built manufacturing facilities in that part of Mexico, it’s quite clear to me that building solar generation of electricity in that part of Mexico has equal solar energy potential to the Southwest part of the United States. In fact, being closer to the equator, I already knew it might be an even better area in which to build solar thermal farms.

Further, such a large development of such solar generation, I believe, will happen that it will add thousands of jobs in this part of Mexico. That addition of jobs will be so large in fact I think it will largely solve the problem of people from Mexico going to the United States illegally for jobs.

But a few days ago, I found out I was wrong!
It seems I was WAY too CONSERVATIVE. The solar potential of Mexico is about SEVEN times as large as that!

In 30 years or so Mexico may be one of the most prosperous countries in the world because of its solar energy just like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait are now from their oil money.

The high potential solar part of Mexico is NOT confined to the far Northern part. Virtually ALL of Mexico has that much potential.

You can see for yourself at 3Tier’s solar potential map of the Western Hemisphere
at htttp://www.3tiergroup.com/ .

The story of this website and some related work on solar potential by Google Earth and Google Maps was in the online news and in the Mercury News in San Jose California two days ago on Monday, 11-3-2008. The Mercury News published a color picture of the North American part of the map in their printed newspaper.

A new map just released by 3Tier, a Seattle company, shows a detailed picture of how much the sun shines at any spot in the Western Hemisphere. Apparently 3Tier can also provide detailed information on solar potential of sites as small as specific houses in any city or town as well.

(That map of the solar potential in the Western Hemisphere & in North America is apparently based on an entire year. As a result, it very much understates the solar potential of California and its Central Valley because it averages the rainy part of the year with the part of the year where there is virtually no rain in California. So, since the largest electricity use is now from air conditioning which is needed in the summer, California has a good bit more solar potential than this map of the entire year would lead you to conclude.)

However, if you once see 3Tier’s solar potential map of the Northern Hemisphere, you can easily see at a glance that the solar potential of Mexico is about THREE times as large as that of the entire United States. That fact certainly jumped right out at me!

Needless to say, that means the economic potential of Mexico is at least equal to the United States, once the economy of the United States and of the world overall switches mostly to renewable energy.

X* X* X* X* X* X*

Interesting but less important points that this solar map of the Western Hemisphere also shows:

1. Utah and Colorado in the United States also have strong solar potential.

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2. The West Coasts of Peru and Chile also have very large solar potential.

I personally know little about Peru; but Chile may well develop solar energy and then help Peru develop solar energy after that. Chile is already one of the stronger economies in South America.