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.”
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
On one hand Musk is quite an innovator. On the other hand he is largely dependent on government subsidies.
But imagine all the fried birds.
Some people play the game better than others.
The view is not a big thing I guess but 100 x 100 is 10,000 share miles. Think about how many solar cells it would take to fill that.
Elon is a danger to societhy. The grid is the achilles heel of such a scheme. As wel as te physical resources.
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!
That’s one of the devils in the details. The utilities have already countered that. They’ll fight to keep the cash flow rolling in.
You do a good job of preaching to the choir of Musk-haters, but that’s it.
Not really such an environment friendly solution as it is touted to be, and the more we turn to it the worse it will become. On top of that it provides no beneficial side effects, such as minor warming making more of the planet habitable, as the burning of fossil fuels does.
100 x 100 miles. Small corner? That’s twice the area of the state of Connecticut.
That is absolute crap. The US uses over 3 terra watts of power. No way that could come from one square mile of batteries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)
Just asking a question.
The other half of this theory... Elon always fails to share how much pollution is created in the making of Solar Cells and Batteries. And batteries are perishable and will need to be replaced now and then. In the end what we have is actually better for the environment. This hypocrisy is all about the money not the environment.
And blinded airplane pilots. This would create a HUGE no-fly area in the US.
IIRC, the January 2008 Scientific American article “A Solar Grand Plan” revealed it would take a large part of the southwest to meet our energy needs, bigger than Musk is claiming. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall.
You need energy storage, too. Compressed Air Energy Storage is limited by geology; batteries don’t last long and use lots of materials; pumped storage has no sites left; flywheels, supercapacitors, and others haven’t proven out for large scale.
Right. One location to shut down an entire nation’s electric power.
...
Musk was making a point that would be easy understand. He’d much rather those panels be distributed on people’s roofs.
Yeah, but is it smaller than the chunk of ice that just snapped off Antarctica? ;-)
you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,
++++
And some way to store a good share of the power that is generated during the daylight hours and is used to light up New York City and perform other similar trivial tasks during the night.
I’m curious about that. Maybe it’s easier than I think.
Duracell AAA back up batteries.
The US uses over 3 terra watts of power.
...
At night?
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