Elon Musk Pushes the Solar Fairy Tale Again in Rogan Interview
Excerpt:
.....In this bit of green energy Unicorn talk, Musk claims that “you could power the whole United States with solar” in an array that covers just 100 by 100 miles. He never admits that this amounts to 10,000 square miles of land, because that number would scare the crap out of listeners, so he always sticks with this “100 by 100” rubric.
This of course is abject nonsense that has been debunked numerous times, but just like Joe Biden frequently claims his son Beau died in Iraq (he didn’t) and that he traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jinping (never happened), Musk insists upon continuing to make the claim.
If you listen closely to his Rogan interview, Musk lays out several qualifications to this claim in subsequent answers, like the low efficiency factor of solar (Musk claims 25%) and his offhand remark “of course, you would need the batteries for backup.”
Oh, you don’t say?
But Musk is a clever man who knows that the average person will only hear the part about such a seemingly small amount of what Rogan exclaims is “worthless” and “desolate” land being able to power the whole country. In response to Rogan’s exclamations, Musk says “yeah, its everywhere.”
First of all, such land is not everywhere, and second of all, that much land isn’t going to do the trick and Musk has to know it. Third of all, Texas politicians in the 1880s also thought all the Permian Basin lands they devoted to the state’s Permanent University Fund were essentially worthless, but since 1923, those worthless lands have generated several hundred billion dollars in funding for what has become the largest state university system in the world.
What’s “worthless” turns out to be not just in the eye of the beholder, but also a product of the march of history.
But let’s say you pick 10,000 square miles of land in the barren desert of Nevada to plunk down this enormous solar array. What next?
Well, first of all, there’s that 25% efficiency factor, which means you’ve really only built maybe 1/4th the nameplate capacity you would really need during ideal weather conditions.
Second, what about transmission? How long is it going to take you to build the hundreds of thousands of miles (if not millions) of high-capacity transmission lines to take all this electricity to the hundreds of thousands of discrete power consumer markets across the Lower 48? (Musk never bothers to mention the needs of Alaska or Hawaii in this bit of sophistry.)
Third, what about line loss on all these miles of transmission lines? What is the line loss factor going to look like on a transmission line from Western Nevada to Maine, for example? How do you account for that? How many thousands more square miles of solar panels and batteries will you need to do it?
Fourth, where are the raw materials going to come from? Where’s all that copper coming from? Will China be willing to keep supplying all the rare earths you’re going to need, because Biden damn sure isn’t going to be permitting any mines.
Fifth, there’s the crisis in supply of high-capacity transformers. Right now, it’s taking up to four YEARS for U.S. transmission companies to source new supplies of these transformers, and inventories are currently at crisis low levels. How are we going to solve that little problem, Elon?
Sixth, there’s the solar panels themselves. Is China just going to agree to supply the millions that would be required for a 10,000 square mile array?
And we haven’t even talked about the batteries yet. Where’s the thousands of square miles of land going to come from to house those? Still in Nevada? Or are we going to Utah for that?
.....Where’s all the money for this going to come from? I’ve seen estimates that that amount of stationary batteries alone would cost $190 trillion, which is double the global GDP. Think of how much inflation we’d incur if Treasury tries to print that much more money. And then you’d need to print trillions more to pay for the array itself, and the transmission lines.
What it all boils down to is what so much of this energy transition ultimately comes to: A fairy tale.
Elon Musk has done a lot of good things for our society, but the pushing of this particular fairy tale is not among them.
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Re Elon:
Maybe Tesla’s solution, once revealed, will help Elon’s vision come to pass?
He named his vehicle after Tesla...
But TtT is adamant that both types of autos will be available and supports the traditional auto companies. So he must know something... and his uncle had Tesla’s papers...
This one’s a “wait and see” for me.
Where do the greenies propose that those thousands of square miles of solar panels go? The environmental impact will be huge. I thought they were all about minimizing environmental impact.
Never mind those pesky details of capturing and distributing the power from a large solar array, sunshine, and all the rest. Musk is exactly right about how much solar energy hits us. I’ve done this math many times. At 300 watts per sq yd enough sunshine falls on a county in Kansas to power the country. I built a parabolic mirror some decades ago to demonstrate this. This is also the reason whining about man-caused climate change is a fools game. The activity of mankind is a nat’s eye worth of effect on the planet.
Never mind those pesky details of capturing and distributing the power from a large solar array, sunshine, and all the rest. Musk is exactly right about how much solar energy hits us. I’ve done this math many times. At 300 watts per sq yd enough sunshine falls on a county in Kansas to power the country. I built a parabolic mirror some decades ago to demonstrate this. This is also the reason whining about man-caused climate change is a fools game. The activity of mankind is a nat’s eye worth of effect on the planet.
* * * Debunking entire-U.S. solar-energy fantasy * * *
