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 ...
Neat thing is it’s easily distributed from centralized square, all the way to individual citizens. 0.1 acre and you’re off the grid.
“Think of the wiring needed to convey all that power.”
Or just relocate your share to your own property.
“Where does the power come from at night??????”
No big deal to have a 350 W/hr battery per square meter of solar panel.
“from a tactical view, this would be a very bad idea.”
Very easy to distribute the panels close to consumers. Excellent tactical options.
Move the panels. Doesn’t all have to be in one location.
No fried birds with photoelectric.
Current solar is nowhere near Musk’s proposal.
Such a project has the benefit of bringing panels down to commodity prices (just like Apple does, making bleeding edge custom parts dirt cheap by enormous short run production).
It would make absolutely no sense to put it all in one place. A few decent size bombs and the country is gone.
The United States is 3.797 million mi²
Something doesn’t add up.
Connecticut is smaller than a lot of western counties.
Do the math. It adds up.
God already figured out how to store energy. Natural gas, carbon rich oil deposits, vast frozen stores of methane, hydrogen from sea water. Solar and wind? Old school and will never be consistent. We may as well orbit some satellites and allow them to drag “brushes” around the magnetic field of Earth. Imagine the power that could be produced by that solar generator, but at what cost?
Well just to be safe..let’s start with a major city...like Chicago...run that on solar for several years and i will be all in.
Dream on my liberal freeper. You need to wake up and come into the real world. If you wanted to live a minimal existence you could live in a tiny hovel and eat bean sprouts. By the way, there will be days where the sun doesn’t shine...what will you do then.
Oh! It just came to me: You live in a 2 room house that has 3 light bulbs (20W), no air conditioning and no refrigerators or electric appliances to cook on. Yep! That’s real living!
I kinda like the smell of dung fires in the morning from the front porch of my mud hut. Sound of skeeters buzzing lovingly around my head. ;-)
“If the gubmint gave me billions, I could be a great innovator too.”
No you wouldn’t and the fact that you’re not proves it.
Whatever money Musk gets from the government is available to you too, if you were creative, had initiative and were hard working enough, which obviously you’re not.
You should read Musk’s biography to appreciate him. He’s literally a force of nature and we should be thankful to have him in our country, quirks and all.
As driven as Steve Jobs was, this guy is ten times that.
We absolutely need visionaries like him, and all the people that put him down are just modern day Luddists.
They would have criticized Edison in his days.
I have no idea what a MISO is. I just know that at least half of the southwest is covered by solar now. Every single new home division being built or built in the last 5 years comes with solar. It’s included on the price of the house and you can’t buy the house without it. Every government building here including all high schools have been retrofitted with solar panel covered parking. Huge parking lots.
But my electricity bill just keeps going up.
B.S. The only innovation Musk excels in is sucking the gubmint teat to build stuff nobody would buy without subsidies. That is not innovation in my book.
Modern-day Luddists, or just people that don't understand the genius process. Our society today has been conditioned toward skepticism of the trail-blazer businessman (current President a ray of hope).
You're right; Edison would not only have been roundly criticized, he would have been suppressed by people like Soros (and his Capitol Hill minions) because Edison would not have wanted to "play" Soros' all-consuming game.
“I would venture to guess that with all the solar on peoples homes, government buildings, schools, etc. that we should already be close to the size he says we need. So why isn’t the US powered from it now?”
Because if you actually did even a back of the envelope calculation you’d find out that the area of installed rooftop solar is roughly 25 square miles, vs the 10000 square miles suggested by Musk.
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