I don’t believe your math is correct. There are 640 acres to a square mile. 100 million acres is 156250 square miles. that is a square that is 395 miles on a side. That makes me think that there is something wrong with the initial article. Something is off by a factor of 1000.
Thank you. You are right. I thought it felt low and off. I don’t know how I screwed up that simple calc.
The bottom line is you need about 1% of that land to build conventional, low-cost, highly reliable fossil plants that can run 24x7.
Highly diffuse sunlight is a stupid way to make utility-scale power.
For comparison, all of Arizona is 156,000 sq miles. They are going to gobble up 1.4 Arizonas.