Elon Musk - "You only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the USA" (HNNNGGG)

[Amerikuracana]

Yes, a giant solar panel that could be struck and the entire nations energy grid knocked off in 10 seconds is godamned genius. Fucking hippies.

Oh, and I'm hotter than you.

 

[rj144]

100x100 miles is HUGE.

That's about 122,000 football fields.

How did you calculate that? It's way more than 122,000... it's something like 16 million.

 

[jefferz]

Pat Boone tried to get the Shark Tank people to invest in bringing the production model of that car to the US.

 

[Gabicho]

I looked into the 20 year guarantees and, like anything else, if the technology fails, the companies will go bankrupt and the consumer will get nothing. To be an actual guarantee, it would need to be backed by someone like Lloyd's of London.

If it is paying for itself in 2 years, you should add more panels to sell electricity to the power company.

Can't sell back to the power company.

And the reason why they can give the service for 20 years, is because they get paid a lot on subsidies from the government. They get the solar panels for super low prices and on credits provided by the government on super low interest.
They get all of this through some of the international agreements on CO2 reduction, World Bank, etc.
Essentially it's government funded companies. Their contracts even have clauses on other companies of the government taking over in case of bankruptcy.
The power company which is state owned just wants to get consumers off their grid which is already saturated and on fumes.

 

[riddleofsteel]

100 miles x 100 miles sounds small, but it's actually not. 10,000 square miles of nothing but solar panels would be a significant engineering endeavour and cost a fortune.

And I realize he's just illustrating a point about what it would take to power the US, and that no one is actually proposing a single massive solar farm, but I'm just pointing out that it's not an insignificant amount of solar panels that are needed.

Yes, that area is larger than 6 states and just short of covering all of Massachusetts, if going by total area covered by the state, larger than 9 states if going by land area only. That would be a good Onion article - Congress has voted to evict all Massholes and convert Massachusetts to a giant solar panel field.

I'd like to see the plan on building solar panel fields for the northeast; how much more area is needed compared to the west and south. Maybe they'll focus more on wind power. Given how several midwest states are now getting substantial amount of their total power from wind (South Dakota 30%, North Dakota 21%, Iowa 35%, Kansas 29%, Oklahoma 25%, Minnesota 17%) and the west has the land for solar panel fields (and wind turbines), looks like the northeast is going to be holding the US back.

 

[TidWell]

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.”

Currently, about 10 percent of energy in the U.S. is renewable.

1. Combine Rooftop Solar Panels and Utility-Sized Solar Plants

Musk sees the solar future for America as a combination of rooftop solar — the panels on a house in the suburbs — and utility-scale solar that can make up needs in other areas. Recently, Tesla confirmed it would build a massive solar-powered battery to help power-starved South Australia.

To find out the rest of his plan, click here, bunnies

Elon Musk is a national treasure, please Amber Heard leave this man alone the last thing we need is this gold digger get pregnant by Musk and drag him through the mud emotionally causing him to be mentally broken down and ruined with no more motivation to work again.

 

[Don Quixote]

Sounds like a great target for any enemies if they want to disrupt the power grid.

 

[Reyesnuthugr]

Sounds like a great target for any enemies if they want to disrupt the power grid.

We should have auxiliary systems in place for this reason.

 

[Fanu]

meh he is full of bs

oh if its on youtube it must be true

I mean a youtuber should know more than a guy who started multiple successful billion dollar business and actually has products on the market? right ? right ?!

people probably said it was impossible to reuse rockets while landing them in the middle of ocean, but here we are..

 

[djacobox372]

His number isn't correct.

Here's are facts:

US yearly energy consumption: 97 quadrillion BTUs
Average clear day sun energy per hour per square mile= 8 Billion BTU (286 BTU's per hour per square foot)
Solar Panel Efficency = 25%

Assuming every day is perfectly sunny for 12 hours, that's 96 Billion BTUs per square mile per day, which is 35 trillion BTU per year

97 quadrillion / 35 trillion = 2771 square miles of sun energy needed

But Solar is only 25% efficient, so that balloons to 12,000 square miles, or an area about 20% bigger than the state of Maryland.

Of course it's not sunny all the time, even in the desert, and equipment doesn't always work as it should, so 15,000 square miles is more likely.

100x100 is 10,000 square miles, so he's off by 50%.

 

[ralphc1]

Can't sell back to the power company.

And the reason why they can give the service for 20 years, is because they get paid a lot on subsidies from the government. They get the solar panels for super low prices and on credits provided by the government on super low interest.
They get all of this through some of the international agreements on CO2 reduction, World Bank, etc.
Essentially it's government funded companies. Their contracts even have clauses on other companies of the government taking over in case of bankruptcy.
The power company which is state owned just wants to get consumers off their grid which is already saturated and on fumes.

What country are you in? I thought every country had the buyback option.

 

[ralphc1]

His number isn't even close. Does he even math?

Here's are facts:

US yearly energy consumption: 97 quadrillion BTUs
Average clear day sun energy per hour per square mile= 8 Billion BTU (286 BTU's per hour per square foot)
Solar Panel Efficency = 25%

Assuming every day is perfectly sunny for 12 hours, that's 96 Billion BTUs per square mile per day, which is 35 trillion BTU per year

97 quadrillion / 35 trillion = 2771 square miles of sun energy needed

But Solar is only 25% efficient, so that balloons to about 12,000 square miles, or an area about 20% bigger than the state of Maryland.

Even if you assume he was just talking about electric power, which is 40% of our power usage, he's still of by 50 times.

Elon is full of shit.

Add to that the proposed switch to electric vehicles will increase the amount of electricity required to charge them and that demand will be mostly at night.

 

[faustian]

They should plaster ghettos with solar panels then we can all pretend that "those people" are actually contributing to society lmfao

 

[Stranger Come Knocking]

big oil gonna assassinate him

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

They should honestly just delete the debt and not pay any countries back, then hold this stance for a while until everyone stops being mad:

The USA are reliant on constant new debt financing for everything.

If the USA simply defaulted like that it would be a catastrophy.

 

[ralphc1]

Yes, that area is larger than 6 states and just short of covering all of Massachusetts. That would be a good Onion article - Congress has voted to evict all Massholes and convert Massachusetts to a giant solar panel field.

I'd like to see the plan on building solar panel fields for the northeast; how much more area is needed compared to the west and south. Maybe they'll focus more on wind power. Given how several midwest states are now getting substantial amount of their total power from wind (South Dakota 30%, North Dakota 21%, Iowa 35%, Kansas 29%, Oklahoma 25%, Minnesota 17%) and the west has the land for solar panel fields (and wind turbines), looks like the northeast is going to be holding the US back.

I wonder when they will start using the Great Lakes for wind farms. There is a lot of wind available there.

 

[djacobox372]

Add to that the proposed switch to electric vehicles will increase the amount of electricity required to charge them and that demand will be mostly at night.

Electric vehicles would reduce energy cost as they are about 3 times as efficient as gas vehicles, which expel most of their energy in heat not forward motion.

In my original analysis I made the mistake to think Elon was talking about 100 square miles not 100x100 miles (10,000 square miles). While he's still overly optimistic, by about 50%, at least he's in the ballpark.

It's still very impractical, imagine what something like that would cost to maintain? One worker per football field size array of solar panels would equate to about 10 million workers. I guess with robotics this may become feasible, but not for a while.

 

[Zookeeper Gabe]

I always wondered why we didn't have solar panels on top of every big box store and giant fucking warehouses everywhere.

 

[Zer]

Sounds like a great target for any enemies if they want to disrupt the power grid.

North Korea already put men on the sun bro. Let's hope they didn't take fire extinguishers with them

 

[John Wang]

I always wondered why we didn't have solar panels on top of every big box store and giant fucking warehouses everywhere.

They should start doing this.