Posted on 07/23/2017 6:20:06 AM PDT by 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.
Its a little square on the U.S. map, and then theres a little pixel inside there, and thats the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny.
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
“They would have criticized Edison in his days.”
Probably not. Edison invented and built stuff that people wanted and could afford without massive gubmint involvement. Same with Jobs. That is not the case with Musk who is probably the single biggest welfare queen in the history of the world.
It's a delicious Japanese soup, LOL.
Sorry, couldn't resist. MISO: Midcontinent Independent System Operator.
MISO Reliability Footprint
https://www.misoenergy.org/LMPContourMap/MISO_All.html
They regulate the electric grid for this area. There are number of ISOs that cover the US.
https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/overview.asp
Well see! I live in California so never heard of MISO. lol
Yeah they can. But an all green grid has no baseload backup except for hydro. The batteries to back that up would not fit in a one mile square. No way.
Look at my posts about MISO, the MISO footprint will swing 30 to 50 thousand megawatts in a day. Baseload picks up that swing.
I think Tesla has a 80MW battery installation for peaks, it’s pretty new. It’s less than a needle in a haystack. They would have to scale that up 500X to handle the swings on the MISO footprint alone. Ain’t gonna happen.
What do you do at night? Shut down the grid?
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.
Here they are covering the parking lots with solar. Makes for nice covered parking. The parking lots are always a lot bigger than the buildings themselves anyway. Our Superintendent of Schools is in the process of retrofitting every single school parking lot in the city. Government buildings are doing it too. Then all our new housing subdivisions in the last 5 years come with solar. You can’t buy a new house without it. Seems like the whole city is covered in solar now. lol
The Unites States is purring along a day after Elon Musk solar array is switched online then.... a some clouds roll in and everything grinds to a halt.
I like solar too. If it was cheap enough I’d have it put on our house. It’s still just too darn expensive and here you still have to be tied into the grid so still have 2 bills. One for the solar and one for the utility company. I guess people save a little money but I don’t want a lien on our paid for house.....period.
“A 1,500 sq ft panel array wont even power the average 1,500 sq ft home”
OK, let’s see... Power generated by panels:
17watts/sqft x 1500sqft = 25.5kw
Let’s say that’s only 8 hours a day. So that’s about 200 kwh/day. You really use that much energy? I doubt it!
“An average central ac will use 3000 to 5000 watts of power every hour for around 9 hours a day during the hotter months”
So during the time that you use the AC most the panels are generating more than 5 times what you need.
So, who exactly is on drugs??
Let’s see your innovation, genius.
As I said all the money that Musk is “sucking” from the government is yours for the taking, why don’t you?
Solar panels are designed to absorb light, not reflect it. But absorption cannot be 100%.
The biggest glare problem is airport PV systems that blind pilots on final approach. This has been studied at major airports by DOT and FAA. Their recommendations are to keep panels away from final approach areas. The glare has also affected air traffic controllers:
Glare From Airport Solar Panels Interfering With Air Traffic Controllers
I would not be surprised that flying over 100 miles of nonstop panels would cause problems. Today's installations are so small an aircraft passes them in a second or less.
So they race around the country collecting sunlight?
Why can’t we just move all the industry (and other users!) around to follow the sunlight?
Admittedly, we have a reputation here on FR of commenting without reading the article, but jeeze, this is on the first line - “has a new solar roof panel division.” He is not talking about paving the desert with them. He is talking about covering roofs with them. He just used a visual example that clearly was beyond the average FReeper’s understanding.
Elon Musk wants your pension money to build buggy whip companies. Awful trade off.
E = m c ^ 2, where c = Big Fat A$$ Number
Solarians are buggy whip holdouts. Musk is a con man.
The money Musk uses to “innovate” comes from people like me who resent it being used to subsidize foolish ideas from hacks like Musk. I am not oriented to being a scumbag who lives off his neighbors as Musk apparently is and I don’t think taxpayer dollars are “mine for the taking” as you said. If Musk’s ideas and products are so good, why do I need to subsidize them? The truth is that Musk is a wholly gubmint created creature who seized the opportunities that Obamadork’s foolishness offered to reprobate money grubbing scumbags like him. He builds products that are needed and unaffordable. If I am wrong, how do you explain this?
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/11/tesla-sold-zero-cars-in-hong-kong-after-the-govt-stopped-subsiding-them/
“He builds products that are needed and unaffordable.”
Should be unneeded and unaffordable.
Elon Musk is like a lot of other snake oil salesmen I have seen. Much better at the vision than he is at the delivery. He still does not have a car that is much more than a beautifully packaged tecnhogizmo and already he is shifting the goal post to his next vision. A vision for someone else to pay for and him to skim from as the money goes by.
All the eggs in one basket proposition???
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