Here's Elon Musk's Plan to Power the U.S. on Solar Energy

inverse.com ^ | 7/16/2017 | Nick Lucchesi

[rktman]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk — whose company makes electric cars and has a new solar roof panel division — reminded more than 30 state governors at the National Governors Association meeting this weekend exactly how much real-estate is needed to make sure America can run totally on solar energy.

“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said during his keynote conversation on Saturday at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”

It’s “a little square on the U.S. map, and then there’s a little pixel inside there, and that’s the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny.”

[Openurmind]

Germany already tried this... It’s not working.

[dynoman]

Note this morning MISO is running about 70 thousand megawatts. So the installed solar would not supply the MISO footprint let alone the rest of the country, let alone at night!

So many are “in the dark” when it comes to how the US electrical grid actually works. Musk included.

[Brilliant]

The problem with those studies that say solar is cheapest is that they mean after the subsidies.

[KavMan]

Right. One location to shut down an entire nation’s electric power.

It’ll take another thousand square miles for the back-up generators and diesel fuel storage. Brilliant!

They can split it up into 4 places so if 1 or 2 of the solar places shut down, there is still 2 other backup places intact

[Reily]

I am convinced that Liberals think all you have to do is install a wall socket somewhere and out flows electricity!

[mountn man]

How does one get the solar produced power from Texas or wherever to, let’s say Maryland (or Alaska, or Hawaii)?

You don’t just produce electricity at one point and have endless supplies at the farthest point.

[rktman]

Volt, Tesla, Leaf. THEN you get electricity out of thin air.

[COBOL2Java]

They can split it up into 4 places so if 1 or 2 of the solar places shut down, there is still 2 other backup places intact

They may still want to have the 4 places geographically diverse, to keep terrorists from having an easy way of shutting the grid down. Remember: you can never have 100% security protection, only to secure it to the point where the enemy calculates that it's not worth the effort.

[Teacher317]

No battery configuration can hold that much energy, even one that covers a square mile. The US consumes 40 billion kWh per day, every day... and with just one short cloudy or stormy period of 3-5 days, the issues multiply... not to mention the very very poor idea of putting all US power in one (easily targeted) location... and not to mention that government will then decide to take over the facility and decide who gets how much electricity and when (”for Social Justice”)...

[servo1969]

And blinded aircraft pilots. Entire cities with glass paneled roofs?

[Garth Tater]

Where does the power come from at night??

Lunar panels. Duh

[FirstFlaBn]

Sneakily avoided is the question of structurally modifying existing buildings to support roof panels. And multistory apartment and office buildings would have only a fraction of the space needed even under the most favorable efficiency claims of unicorn engineers.

Is Musk offering to pay for the roof repairs necessitated by leaks caused by additional penetrations? How do your reshingle a roof covered with solar panels? Who replaces a broken panel resulting from a falling tree limb?

How much living space would need to be sacrificed for batteries in an already cramped housing unit? How much heat generated by the batteries, increasing A/C load?

How are those battery powered airliners supposed to work? How about shipping - Mississippi River towboats, ferryboats, freighters?

[COBOL2Java]

How does one get the solar produced power from Texas or wherever to, let’s say Maryland (or Alaska, or Hawaii)?

You don’t just produce electricity at one point and have endless supplies at the farthest point.

---

You'd be surprised...

The electrical grid that powers mainland North America is divided into multiple regions. The Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection are the largest. Three other regions include the Texas Interconnection, the Quebec Interconnection, and the Alaska Interconnection. Each region delivers 60 Hz electrical power. The regions are not directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.

That is why a squirrel committing harikari on a transmitter caused a major blackout on the Eastern grid in 2003.

[nuke_road_warrior]

Not having access to his assumptions I am skeptical of his statement regarding the area involved. However, assuming the numbers are correct, how much will it cost co cover every square inch of 10,000 square miles of Nevada? The area involved is larger than New Hampshire and only slightly smaller than Massachusetts. The structural cost alone would be mindboggling. Earth based solar power on the best day has a capacity factor of 50%. If, for example, you need to supply 1000 megawatts to meet demand, with solar you need to install 2000 megawatts capacity to assure the demand is met.

It gets worse, you need expensive (very) batteries to average out the delivery rate at night, and then you need to covert the DC electricity from the photovoltaic cells and batteries to AC for use on the grid. The batteries and converters have efficiency losses built into them. These inefficiencies generate waste heat that must be rejected. Sensitive electronics, batteries, and the DC/AC converters must be kept cool in the Nevada desert, adding additional drain on the power that can put on the grid.

Actual cost information for installation and maintenance of large-scale solar power is hard to come by (deliberately?). However, if solar is truly competitive with fossil or nuclear power, why aren’t major utilities falling all over themselves to build large-scale projects? The answer of course is that without various taxpayer subsidies it is not economically viable, and those subsidies are at the whim of the state and Federal governments.

[alloysteel]

Develop the technology by which the solar collection units be placed in SPACE, not on the terrestrial real estate, in geosynchronous orbit, so there are collection units ALWAYS bathed in sunshine. Set up an earth receiving station on the ground, close in to the centers where the greatest power consumption is expected. Direct a very tight microwave beam which transmits the power from the collection unit to the earth station, and transmit the power downward that way. Minimal disruption due to weather, the lifetime of the various components measured in decades rather than years, and a virtually uninterruptible transmission of power. The one serious problem area would be the amount of power coursing along the transmission beam, which would seriously fry anything that flew into its path, making it absolutely mandatory to keep any traffic from cutting through the beam.

There are no-fly zones already mapped out on the earth’s surface. This no-fly zone would simply have a very swift and deadly enforcement provision.

Might still fry some birds, as the creatures would have no way of knowing where these danger zones lay. And anything that knocks the transmission antenna the least bit off its locked-in focus could do extreme mischief on the earth surface, if a stray beam falls outside the receiving target.

But these are just engineering problems.

[plain talk]

If you did that you wouldn’t put them all in one place. You would distribute them. Maybe 10 or more. Each one 10x10 miles. But then you would still have distribution losses.

I love the idea of solar power. I wish it was cost effective and if it were market based I’m all in.

If this is such a great idea then why haven’t the socialist countries already done it?

[butlerweave]

Everyone gets something except the Taxpayers, they get the Shaft and the Bill

[wjr123]

I am more than a bit concerned bout Musk’s lack of knowledge. HIs statement is absurd as he simply does not take into account of line transmission loss.

Energy sources currently need to be reasonably close to energy consumers.

[Reily]

The how much “real estate” do you want to give up and effect wildlife, etc is the first “hammer” I pull out of my “argument toolkit” when I go after the “solarians”.

How many more “hammers” I pull depends on my time, patience and how big a blubbering liberal mess I want to leave.

[PIF]

Actually that’s how they think of the food supply also - food comes from supermarkets - canned, boxed, and wrapped - just pop in and pick up what they need.