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

About 2% of land area for the whole world iirc.

Could float them as well but no real point. Shitty land is cheap abd abundant.

hes building one of these batteries in Australia to power a large portion of one of the states, hes putting his money where his mouth is, if it doesnt do what he claims its free

In 100 days no less.
 
Weird, if all those climate change leftists people just outfitted their properties with solar you'd be half way there already.

Tough to do in apartments.

But our fossil fuel loving clean coal promoting PM had them installed.

He knows the fossil fuel industry will hamper progress and lead to an energy crisis. It is true energy independence.
 
10.000 square miles is fucking huge though in terms of man made structures, although you wouldn't want it all in the same place.

Certainly you should have local solar in suitable locations plus a network of solar stations to add to the grid. I'm not so sure about the batteries though. They don't last forever, take a lot of energy and chemicals to make and need maintenance. I like what they did in Wales where they have lake powering a hydro station and when there's too much power in the grid, it just pumps the water back up to the lake again to store the power. That seems like a pretty green way of doing it rather than mllions of tons of nasty battery technology.

A company called 1414 degrees is about to list on the ASX.

Its uses super heated silicone to store energy. Silicone is the 2nd most abundant element on earth, rarely pure though.
 
I would actually support trump for once if he said some shit like that. It would also cause global financial collapse lmao.

Impossible to do while running deficits, who would lend to you after that.
Also the cost of ever American owned foreign asset being nationalised would out weigh the amount owed.
 
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Good point. If this is such a "pays for itself, catchall solution," why don't I see every home in Malibu studded with the things, and people constantly bragging about how solar cuts their power bills to a fraction of normal etc etc? Big oil's reach must be long indeed...

Don't get me wrong - alternative energy sources will be the future. Thing is, we've been hearing hyperbole for decades about solar and wind in particular and if half of it were true, it would be *way* more prevalent. It's not. People are not voting with their wallets, even heavily motivated people. What's the real story here?

Over 50% of new energy capacity installed last year was zero emission tech.

It's been a long time coming but the change has happened.
 
It wouldn't make sense to have the battery and solar panel system set up in one location. It would be an easy target for enemies to wipe out the entire electrical grid and wreak havoc.

You would need to have them all scattered. But it does put things into perspective that the space required to power the entire country with solar energy really isn't that much.

That one of the best attributes of solar. You can and probably would spread it over many locations.

Right now generation comes from a small number of massive plants.

No solar farms would generate an equal amount per plant, instead they are spread. Diversified generation and storage is possible with solar and wind but not with coal or gas.
 
I'm all for wealthy people financing dreams like this. An idea like this has transformative power.

Yea its transformative alright. A large array can heat the air to over 900 degrees, frying birds midflight. Now imagine a 100 X 100 miles area heating the air over it to almost 1000 degrees. You mother fuckers with this green stuff are like mad scientists. This would be like putting a space heater on the earth.

 
Yea its transformative alright. A large array can heat the air to over 900 degrees, frying birds midflight. Now imagine a 100 X 100 miles area heating the air over it to almost 1000 degrees. You mother fuckers with this green stuff are like mad scientists. This would be like putting a space heater on the earth.



1000 birds a year seems like less environmental damage than coal.
 
Yea its transformative alright. A large array can heat the air to over 900 degrees, frying birds midflight. Now imagine a 100 X 100 miles area heating the air over it to almost 1000 degrees. You mother fuckers with this green stuff are like mad scientists. This would be like putting a space heater on the earth.


I heard US Fish & Wildlife Service mentioned. Waited for the dude. Yep, exactly like Federal Wildlife Marshall Willenholly.

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Not disappointed.
 
1000 birds a year seems like less environmental damage than coal.

Then you missed the point entirely. That is a small array compared to what Elon is talking about. He is talking about a 100X100 mile area where the air would be heated to over 900 degrees. Its insane.
 
Then you missed the point entirely. That is a small array compared to what Elon is talking about. He is talking about a 100X100 miles area where the air would be heated to over 900 degrees. Its insane.

As Usher said 'let it burn'
 
Impossible to do while running deficits, who would lend to you after that.
Also the cost of ever American owned foreign asset being nationalised would out weigh the amount owed.
Yeah.. That's why I said it would cause global financial collapse lol
 
1000 birds a year seems like less environmental damage than coal.
It would not happen like this anyways. You can get electricity maybe 200 km's before it starts to disperse. There are a ton of other problems as well.

Elon is no scientist, he is a salesman.
 
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.

It would cost around $73T, but its not as crazy as it sounds.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...uld-We-Need-to-Power-the-Entire-United-States
Seeing this article made me a bit curious about this question.

Just doing the basic math. I'm not factoring in any complex calculations. Just doing straight up multiplication and division.

According to the EIA, the United States consumed a total of 89.456 Billion Quadrillion BTU's over the first 11 months of 2014. Estimating for December, that means roughly 100 for the full year.

Converting to typical SI units, that is about 29.3 million Gigawatt-hours.

Using the standard of the Topaz Solar Farm, one of the largest solar farms currently in existence, which generates about 1000 Gigawatt-hours per year, it would require about 29,300 similar solar farms.

The Topaz Solar farm uses 9 million photovoltaic cells, meaning that many farms would need about 264 billion solar panels photovoltaic cells. Assuming one solar panel holds 40 photovoltaic cells means about 6.6 billion solar panels.

The Topaz Solar farm cost 2.5 Billion dollars, meaning it would cost 73 trillion dollars to build 29,300 of them.

Now, how does that compare to other forms of energy generation?

Comparing that to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the US, Susquehanna produces about 18,000 GWh of energy per year, or about 18 times as much as Topaz, but it cost 8 billion (2007) dollars to construct, or about 3.2 times as expensive.

The Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydroelectric plant in the United States, produces about 20,000 GWh of energy per year, or about 20 times as much as Topaz, and cost about 5.5 billion (1998 dollars) for its current electrical generation, or about twice as expensive.

Alta Wind Energy Center, the largest wind farm in the US, generates about 1690 GWh per year, and has so far cost 1.85 billion.

One of the advantages of renewable energies that often go unheralded is their ability to be implemented on a smaller scale, relatively closer to their points of usage. One of the costs that don't often get factored in is the amount of energy lost due to transport. Because electricity often has to be transported from highly centralized power stations and distribution points, more energy is often lost in transport than used by residential and commercial consumers. Small-scale wind and solar farms that can be placed relatively close to residential and commercial properties would be much more efficient, since so much less energy is lost between the generators to the consumers.

At the end of the day, people may look at the sheer numbers involved in such projects and scoff, but it is often good to remind them of how these costs do not just go away when considering less-renewable, less-sustainable means. And it is often good to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope type calculations, just to show that as large as the numbers can get, they are still well within the means of possibility.

For example, imagine taking 1% out of our 600 billion annual defense expenditures and investing that in renewable energy generation. It's not that far out of our grasp as people may think.
 
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