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Here's Elon Musk's Plan To Power the US on Solar Energy (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Musk's keynote speech: 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."
Let's take some of these Big Oil subsidies and work on free electricity for the citizens of the lower 48 (corporations are except).
I didn't do the maths myself beyond the back of a mental napkin, but these folks have http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/... and apparently the overall space checks out. Its far from the first time that similar scale claims have been made, and no, consolidating our entire solar grid into a single spot wouldn't make much sense from a security standpoint, but its interesting to think that we could get from here to there with no more (or less) effort for the country than, say, the Apollo program took.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
One square mile of batteries Is all that's needed to store the energy for the entire US?
Color me skeptical.
(fine print: it's a 200 story building)
1) Make sure we only let the already rich energy companies be involved in setting up the solar array and battery park.
2) Make solar cells and batteries illegal to own and operate on private lands, and require citizens to purchase energy from the energy companies.
3) Collect massive kickback cheques from corporate lobbyists for energy company.
Oh whoops, that's the POLITICAL plan of action, not the actual implementation of the tech.
even PETA. the list just goes on forever
Specifically, the cost part.
A quick google and a couple minutes with a calculator comes up with ~$1.5T for the solar panels, assuming sunny days all year round.
Plus the cost of the batteries, of course. And extra panels to cover rainy days.
And let's not forget the distribution system (which ranges from negligible to horrendous, depending on a lot of factors).
And the factories to build 50 billion or so solar panels.....
So, doable? Yeah, could be done. Cheap and easy? Not hardly.....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It can power the entirety of America with considerably less risk
This plan will end up costing trillions and still will not work. It will also will cost trillions in grid improvements and probably tens of trillions in storage. I am sure Musk likes the idea of the US giving him trillions, but I think their are better and cheaper options.
Elon's publicists are doing a great job keeping his name in the news. At least twice a week we have an Elon story - he says something about something or some pres release from SpaceX or Tesla.
Self-promotion is the name of the game, boys and girls!
Especially in Silly Valley!
This is how it's done. You gotta do it too.
With your shit lithium ion. Come up with a decent hydrogen setup and stop polluting like a dipshit and paying ,millions a year to PR firms to turn you into a cult figure for pseudo-intellectuals.
Note that he does not bring up how much the solar panels would cost, or how much the nation's power grid would have to be updated to transfer that electricity efficiently to the far corners of the country (and how you only need that little space if it is in the areas that are best for solar production)
Unless you can start making the solar panels for an order of magnitude less money then just the solar panels (not including the installation costs, power converter costs, etc...) would run well over the current national debt.
I definitely favour replacing all fossil and nuclear power generation with renewable energy sources including solar, wind, tidal and geothermal. However, in the case of solar energy, can anyone estimate the potential impact on the environment of fabricating a square mile of say lithium-ion batteries? how much lithium would that require? What amount of the earth's crust would we have to mine in order to get it?
Similarly, with a solar array of Musk's proposed 10,000 square miles, what would the rate of replacement for panels be? If a panel performed at optimum for say 10 years, it would mean that you might theoretically have to replace 1,000 square miles of panels each year... For panels with a 20 year operational life, that would drop to 500 square miles of panels a year.
Obviously efficiencies of mass production are going to bring the costs down, but this is going to take some serious capital investment to get going. Definitely worth it, but maybe the southernmost states could do a good job of generating electricity and then selling it to their northern neighbours...
Now all we've got to do is figure out room-temperature superconductivity, so that we can get all the power transmitted to where it's needed without the transmission loss...
A 10,000 square mile solar array? Difficult to attack/sabotage/cripple, just due to sheer size.
A 1 square mile electric energy storage farm? Easier to attack. That's what I'd be afraid of.
that's the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny."
and real easy to target
So apart from the obvious reasons for not doing this - the weather, you also have to consider resilience, counter-terrorism, not having all your wires in one basket.
And on top, the requirement for electricity will always keep growing. So that 1 sq. mile will become 2 (especially when everyone has an electric car). And while the batteries may only take up a square mile, how much space will the industrial slag from their manufacture take up?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
people will be asking questions like, "how much would that cost?" (hundreds of billions), "do we need to do it?" (no; balanced supply is best), and "is this a good idea as described?" (again, no, putting all your solar stuff in one SPOF plus the transmission costs & losses would be awful).
But yeah, gotta like Musk's vision and his way of putting things over to the politicos in a simple way. Don't forget, even dumb-ass "professional" wrestlers get to be Governors...
Every true patriot knows that oil and especially coal are the only good power sources. They made the US great before and can do so again. It's true..
The fact that he is wanting other people to pay for it first demonstrates his lack of faith in his vision.
Would building such a plant cost anymore than SpaceX did before received his first check?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
everyone is checking square miles and power output... but nobody is asking how many panels. I'm getting somewhere around 10.7BILLION panels. (Assuming 26sq ft/panel) Anyone who thinks we're going to deploy - or even have the materials to construct - 10.7 billions solar panels is straight up stupid. And not only do they have to be built, they have to be maintained. Wiped down daily to remove all the dust, and replacing panels as soon as they fail. Building, then maintaining, that many panels is beyond problematic.
As cool as all that is, I still think the better solution is to have every roof covered with panels and have local / neighborhood battery storage.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This is a great idea! A small area on which the entire US depends, for its energy, which is easily targeted by countries that don't like us very much. One missle takes out the entire country's energy source. Impossible to come up with a better way for us to commit national suicide.
100 hundred years of US garbage will need a landfill 100 ft high, and 18 miles on each side.
People lose their minds over the landfill "problem", so it seems Mr. Musk is going to have a hard time convincing them to switch to solar.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
That was a weird point. Anything can be 1 square mile in area as long as you are willing to go high enough.
Is Mr. Musk talking about a building ten feet high (roughly one storey) or 1,000? In either case, they only take up one square mile.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Wasn't this the plan in Forbidden Planet ?
Toss in a rogue A.I. called the I.D. and we're all doomed.
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail...
He is not the first one to suggest using solar powers closer to the equator to power the northern hemisphere. The problem is that once you generated that power, you need some way transport it to where it's needed. There are some more detailed concepts based on HVDC, but that's still fairly new and unproven tech.
Elon Musk just invented 2-D batteries!!! If we fold the 1 square mile of batteries just right I can hold all of the power needed for the US in my pocket. But why stop there? I know I am being pedantic but I just couldn't help myself.
In fact, let's rename it 'universal basic electricity' so that the Slashdot crowd will get interested.
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,"
We've easily got that much space sitting mostly unused on roofs. Even better it's already right where we need most of the electricity. Obviously Musk and Co are already well aware of this fact. It just requires an investment horizon longer than the end of your nose.
I prefer to look at production in terms of megawatt-hours-per-year-per-year. According to Wikipedia, the projected total PV output for the entire world was projected to be around 400,000 Megawatt-Hours this year
No.
The graph you link shows a production rate of 400,000 Megawatt (p) this year. Not Megawatt-hours.
Megawatt (p) = "peak Megawatt". One MW(p) of solar panels would produce 1 Megawatt under peak sun: that is, at noon, if placed normal to the noon sun. How many megawatt-hours you get from that many panels depends on how much sunlight they get (which depends on where they are, how cloudy it is, and what direction they are pointed).
Here's a map of the global insolation (short for "incident solar radiation", by the way) on a horizontal surface (which is not the optimum pointing for a solar panel): http://solargis.com/assets/gra...
Sunlight at noon is nominally 1 kW/m2, so the numbers on the top are effective hours of noon sunlight per year. Thus, if you put the panels horizontal at the "orange" regions of this map, you get about 2200 hours of sunlight. So: multiply your "Megawatts (p)" by 2200 to get Megawatt-hours.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Republicans.
As long as they are in power, forget Solar, it's coal and oil all the way. Because they are that stupid.
if you lived in Arizona, that would be great. Where I am, you'd get maybe a quarter to third of the power you'd normally want to use, and that might not be a bad thing at the lower prices that are coming. But what you're proposing is a more a backup or emergency strategy for over half the county.
Not at all. Stop it with the claim that a solution has to be perfect in every respect to be worth doing. Even if rooftop solar doesn't cover 100% of your energy needs it still is a fantastic idea and certainly is more than a backup/emergency idea. I've already done the math and with current technology I could be net zero or better to the grid with my house if I had a solar covered roof and I live in a northern state not noted for intense sun. I'm hardly the only one in that situation. Roofs are nothing but wasted space right now. Rather than covering green fields with solar panels it makes absolute sense to cover roof tops with them. With the cost of solar panels and batteries getting low enough there really is no good argument not to if you can plan for periods of time longer than the current year. Most of the US gets more than enough sunlight to justify rooftop solar as a big part of our energy portfolio. Rooftop PV has an estimated capacity of around 818TWh/year which is enough to cover about 20% of our total energy needs. Total solar capacity is something like 400TWh/year which is over 100X our current total energy usage.
Elon's always been a fencing scar and Persian cat from being a true Bond villain.
Obviously he's going to use SpaceX as a means to loft a NAZI Sun Gun to bend the world to his will.
I mean with those resources, he'd have to be STUPID to not go the SSPS / superweapon route.
Posting this logged in so you know why when I go missing...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Southern US border = 1989 miles (source)
100 miles x 100 miles = 10,000 sq miles (source)
Thickness of solar wall needed: 10,000sq miles / 1989 miles = 5.03 miles
Take this sig and smoke it.
So will he be running for president in 2020?
As much as he scares me with all his wealth and privilege, and at times out-of-touch-ness with the real needs, he's better than the next top-down clown that will inevitably sit on the throne.
A quick google and a couple minutes with a calculator comes up with ~$1.5T for the solar panels, assuming sunny days all year round.
That cheap???? The U.S. spends 1.2 Trillion dollars on electricity per year.
oops, my google-fu failed me. 1.2 Trillion is the amount we spend on all energy per year, not just electricity. Electricity is about 31 percent of that.
Still, you're saying that four years of the money we spend on electricity would pay for the panels? Still sounds like a bargain.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Solar has a very low capacity factor (~20%-30%) which means we need to find a way to store the electricity.
We have that and we're making it better fast. Batteries are already available at reasonable price points and the cost is falling steadily.
The majority of storage is done thru pumped-hydro.
Some is but that's going to change as solar and becomes more popular. You'll see homes and businesses with battery packs in steadily increasing numbers in the coming decades. It's already cheap enough that I can buy a battery pack to power my home for an entire day for under $10K and the price keeps falling.
Tesla's gigafactory is not going to be able to produce enough batteries for grid level storage.
Why do you presume it will be the only factory producing batteries? It is almost inevitable that there will be more factories like it and probably sooner than you think. Never mind the fact that they already ARE producing batteries for grid storage.
This plan will end up costing trillions and still will not work. It will also will cost trillions in grid improvements and probably tens of trillions in storage. I am sure Musk likes the idea of the US giving him trillions, but I think their are better and cheaper options.
What options do you think are "better and cheaper" in the long run? Nuclear fission will never happen for political reasons if nothing else. Fossil fuels are a dead end that will choke the planet. Fusion doesn't exist yet. Hydro is fine but limited. Geothermal same thing. Seriously, what do you think is better? I think distributed solar and industrial scale wind are easily the least worst option available to most of us. The cost is already competitive and falling fast. Nothing else available is meaningfully cleaner. Nothing else out there is as easy to distribute. We're going to be investing trillions into energy one way or another so why not pick the one that is clean and that we know works?
Just for scale, there is purportedly a ton of gold in every cubic mile of seawater.
A quick google and a couple minutes with a calculator comes up with ~$1.5T for the solar panels, assuming sunny days all year round.
Fossil fuel subsidies cost the globe $5 Trillion each year. So by that standard your number seems downright reasonable and cost effective.
So, doable? Yeah, could be done. Cheap and easy? Not hardly.....
Nobody said it would be cheap but it might easily be cheaper than all of the alternatives. Certainly will be cheaper than fossil fuels and the baggage they bring.
One massive bet on the stability and reliability of the weather. What could possibly go wrong with this? And that it would all be sourced through a single vendor... just perfect. Call me old fashioned, but there was a reason our ancestors abandoned weather-driven power sources when steam came along.
Batteries are measured by volume, not by area. If you create Empire State height building and house batteries, it will takes much less area. My calculation shows that 20 hours of backup capacity (minimum needed) would need 4 meter height battery for 1 sq mile and 72 hour backup capacity would need around 15 m (50 ft) tall batteries (assuming 500 Wh/L). That is assuming that they are all packed together.
You can't put all these batteries together as it would be equivalent of thousands of atomic bombs of the size which was dropped on Hiroshima. In fact any utility sized plant (1000 MW and above) will have issue with batteries if you go with 72 hour backup. It would need capacity of about 86400*3*1000*1000000*1.25 (1.25 comes from charge/discharge efficiency) = 3.25*10^14. This is about 4 times energy of the atomic dropped on Hiroshima. Putting so many batteries at single location would be a disaster waiting to happen. It may be better to put batteries in smaller civic areas like a county substation.
1.5 T$ for cleaner air????
The air in the USA is getting cleaner and cleaner every year, for ALL major pollutants !
Save the cash !
See:
https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2016
of solar panels. Practically nothing!
I've never understood why people always talk about using such a big area. For years where I'm at new apartment buildings are required to have cable connectors. Because cable is considered a 'utility'. Well, so is electricity. So why not require them to have solar panels and batteries as well? Most apartments have utilities included in the rent anyway. So in the long run the owner is going to save money. The builders would probably scream, "It's a burden!" which is what they did when they were forced to add cable. But you know what, let's just take the Ethanol subsidy and convert that into a Solar Subsidy. This will help offshoot the cost. And everyone will be happier in the long run. Well, except the Iowa Caucus of course. ;)
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Most of those [pumped-hydro] locations are already tapped.
For context, there's about 21 GW of pumped hydro capacity in the United States, which is about 1/5th of the capacity of all operating nuclear power plants in the US. But are most of those locations tapped?
No. I'll give you two general counterexamples.
1. One counterexample is the "west coast" of the lower peninsula of Michigan. There is one pumped hydro facility there, called Ludington. It's roughly 2 GW in capacity (with roughly 18 GWh in storage), and about 1000 acres in surface coverage. The lower reservoir is Lake Michigan; the upper reservoir is a man-made pond. But the geological features aren't unique to Ludington, MI -- it's prevalent on much of the lower peninsula's Lake Michigan coast, the result of dunes formed over millennia as debris blew west to east across Lake Michigan. Bottom line: there's no physical reason why one couldn't build a dozen facilities the scale of Luddington, also using Lake Michigan as a lower reservoir.
2. A second counterexample can be found at Taum Sauk mountain. The Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station is a pumped hydro facility with 450 MW of capacity and 3,600 MWh of storage. The lower reservoir wasn't a pool of water at all until the facility was built; it was merely a fork of the Black River. The upper reservoir is an above ground swimming pool, built on top of the mountain. It's entirely man made. The geographic feature needed -- an elevation delta of a few hundred feet (860 in this case), with a slope common for forested mountainside, near a river -- isn't unique by a long shot.
That's two counterexamples off of the top of my head -- the Michigan coast of Lake Michigan and anywhere you've got a mountainous region with a river nearby. Plenty of technical potential.
The reason we don't have more pumped hydro is because the energy market price differential (LMP or system lambda, depending on region) between 3 am and 3 pm simply isn't large enough. It doesn't make economic sense to build more pumped hydro so long as we continue to burn coal and gas unabated, because the gap between the daily highs and lows aren't adequate. However, if we continue to retire coal and gas (and nuclear as it ages) and we continue to build solar PV, we'll see a flip where the peak price of energy drifts from early afternoon to 9 pm -- and storage will be economic, buying energy at 11am and selling it after sundown. Michigan could be the evening power center for the entire Midwest, and scattered new pumped hydro facilities on select Appalachian and Rocky terrain could easily store significant amounts of solar and wind output nearer the coasts.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Fossil fuel extraction companies get their coal, gas and oil for free. They don't pay for it. Talk about a subsidy.
I used the word most, and not all. Also just a couple of weeks ago the national academy of science debunked the feasibility of a 100% wind, water, and solar system.
Oh crap, I wonder where all these ppl are getting 5,10,15, 20, & 30 year loans for their education, cars, and homes.
There's a lot of that money that couldn't be reclaimed by simply moving to another system of generation. Do a bit more research into the cost of infrastructure and this time don't stop reading when you reach the first figure that supports your narrative. We have too much of that shit around here.
Too many posts modded up with terribly wrong information that get modded up because it fits an agenda and that slowly creeps into the "facts" category because people are lazy. Sadly, you may find your first (erroneous) post up-modded while this one lays idle simply because of that way of thinking.
Many of these analyses are missing a basic, fundamental point and variations on that point: You don't have to do the full monty to get improvements.
1. Even if you only have solar farms and no batteries, that reduces the dependency on fossil fuel. For certain parts of the country, the times of maximum insolation correspond really quite well with maximum usage due to cooling and business / manufacturing needs, so no batteries needed, and the existing generating capacity can be scaled back to cover nights and days with less sun.
2. Battery capacity can be phased in (a corollary to point 1) and the system will still be useful.
3. Just because you can't do it all immediately and POOF have a sudden switchover to full solar doesn't mean it isn't a laudable goal to work in that direction. Moreover, because it will disrupt a fair chunk of the economy to switch over to solar, doing it gradually (on the scale of decades) makes sense.
4. Even if the goal is only to achieve 10% replacement of existing fuel-based generating capacity with solar, it's a good thing to do.
5. Our existing nuclear power plants have a finite lifetime and replacement capacity will need to come from somewhere.
6. Just because solar power doesn't make as much sense in certain parts of the country (primarily the more northern lattitudes) doesn't mean there is no value to deploying it where it does make sense.
7. Tesla is a battery manufacturer (among other things); chemical batteries aren't the only way to go for storage. Lithium batteries in particular might not even be a good way to go, given their limited lifetime and potential to catch fire as a failure mechanism.
8. Batteries alone (or some storage technology) without any solar power might be a good idea to allow scaling-back of peak generating capacity.
So, a national effort to improve the power infrastructure just might be a good idea, even if it isn't quite the pipe dream from the summary.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Were talking about Musk here... if there is only one person in the world who could pull this off and be profitable at it its him.
[($)]
"... you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States ... The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile."
I get just a little suspicious when someone says their project requires a round number of something.
Man, that website's annoying. Is there any way to get rid of those "Explore" and "Follow" links at the top of the web page? Yech!
So you want to pay for the money to prepay your electric bill for the next 20 years, then churn the cycle again because that's the stated lifespan of the panels?
Do you actually have a dime to your name or are you just some nimwit with no money spewing bullshit?
Extended loan periods for anything end up raping you on interest. This includes 30 year home loans.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There are many technical problems with storage, transmission, and control. But those problems don't come into play if the government doesn't give them priority and if the government regulated utilities successfully fight them. Utilities fight solar power with wheeling regulations, pretending that the electrons in one meter are different than the electrons in a different meter owned by the same person or business. The PACE program for financing solar enhancements with property taxes has been fought at the federal, state, and county levels. Transmission lines from where the power is generated to where it is used have been blocked in ownership wars. Utilities don't have incentives to implement solar power because they can't charge a percentage of nothing. No one seems to have strong incentives to invest in storage systems that would even out supply and demand times.
Technical solutions could be found and implemented much faster if the government recognized an energy crisis and put a top priority on solving it. That's probably not going to happen until citizens start hurting.
Of the $5.302T they claim for 2015, $333B was pre-tax subsidies. Here pre-tax subsidies mean when consumers pay a price lower than the cost to produce; these are by-gosh real subsidies, like Saudi Arabia charging citizens 60-cents per gallon and eating the difference. They lump producer and consumer subsidies together, but a footnote says "Producer subsides as estimated by the OECD are realtively small, at $16.8 billion in 2011 and $17.9 billion in 2015."
The largest portion of the $5T+ is in "post-tax subsidies", which here are the externalities:
* Global warming
They figured global warming costs at $1.268T
* Local pollution
They figured local pollution at $2.734T
* Congestion $359B
* Accidents $271B
* Road damage $24B
I'm not at all clear as to how these would not also apply to a worldwide fleet of 100% emission-free EVs, charged by 100% emission free power (solar, wind, hydro plants).
* Foregone consumption tax revenue $313B
Some countries, like the US, do not have a national consumption tax and some have a consumption tax, but energy is discounted or excluded. If the whole world had consumption taxes AND if energy was included in those taxes...we'd have garnered that figure, apparently. Of course, the US would not be taxing the consumption of electricity made by Mr. Musks solar plant, either, so those was also represent "foregone consumption tax revenue".
Vermont is 9,616 sq miles
Massachusetts is 10,554 sq miles
Real tiny.
CAPTCHA: laughed
Is anyone else as tired of his opinions as I am? His electric car company will be an also ran in the EV race. He's just another con man that greedy people love to listen to. Enough.
Why the hell is he talking about square miles of batteries? Has he lost his mind? A given capacity of energy storage is typically noted in Joules or Watt*hours, not square miles. Use normal units please. Not just Musk. Please everyone, use normal units. I've had it with the "10 elephants of pressure" or "10 libraries of congress of storage capacity" or "5 football fields of length" etc. Please use normal units everyone.
This guy is a master at getting the government (i.e. taxpayers) to foot the bill for him. $7,500 tax credit for every new car that Tesla sells? Same deal with the solar panels.
Don't get me wrong - I want solar to be the answer. But....
1) Current batteries only operate at about 20% efficiency. Get it up to about 50% and we really have something.
2) Disposing of old batteries and outdated solar panels is an environmental disaster just waiting to explode. These things contain some of the most toxic chemicals known to mankind. You think the latest oil spill was a disaster? You ain't seen nothing yet.
People don't want to talk about this because they want to believe that solar is "clean". And in several aspects it is. But it's not "free" in the sense that there are no byproducts or pollutants. I think that in the next 5-10 years this is going to be a real problem. What do we do then Elon?
We've known all of this for years. Here's a talk by Nathan Lewis from 2010, skip to the 11min mark if you want to see the 100x100mi solar square. In fact, you'd probably need less today since panel efficiency has gone up a bit. Everything Musk talks about is old, yet apparently when Musk says is, everything old is new again! Take for example solar shingles, sold by DOW in 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_shingle).
Keep moving those goalposts Bobbie!
Let SkeyNet ...erm... AI solves them for us!
Do you know what the system lamda is for pumped hydro? For batteries, I come up with $0.07-0.12 depending on the exact operating mode.
Why does not solar power take off like a rocket?
It would strip the incumbent interests bare.
Solar power would for the most part take ZERO real estate. Roofs are the natural place for these. Energy storage would take space, garden sheds could be used if the attics can't handle the mass of lead.
Efficient mass production of solar will lower the cost of these devices to rival price decline like in TV screens.
The politicians, oil companies, power utilities, and their lobbyists are not your friends.
Every time I hear people speak of a carbon free future they will mention wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal but add the caveat of something like "with a little bit of nuclear" as if to try to please the entirety of the crowd.
Musk is doing the same in his talks, he'll say that solar would work to meet our energy needs. Of course he'd say that, he's a salesman trying to sell his products. I ask, how much would it cost? Not just in dollars but in lives.
According to this study the safest energy source we have is nuclear power.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
According to the EIA nuclear is very low cost in dollars too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I've had people dispute the numbers on nuclear power safety by claiming those numbers did not include large scale accidents like Chernobyl. As far as I can tell the numbers not only include Chernobyl but also expected reduced lifespan from the survivors. Chernobyl is also largely irrelevant, no one builds nuclear power like that any more and no one would be foolish enough to do so in the future.
People then tend to dispute the solar death numbers by claiming that trip and fall deaths "don't count" for some reason. These are still people dead from the construction and maintenance of solar power, even if it's because people failed to follow the safety rules and paid with their lives for it. By this metric we could say Chernobyl deaths "don't count" because they failed to adhere to proper safety protocols and many died as a result. Dead is dead, and if we are honest about the deaths then nuclear is much safer than even solar.
Then there is the carbon footprint, the whole reason we are having this discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nuclear power has nearly half the carbon output per energy produced than solar photovoltaic power. Concentrated solar thermal power has a lower carbon footprint than nuclear but that is not what Musk is selling, likely because those cannot be put on the roof of your house and because at current estimates it would cost double what PV does.
I look at the math and I found that Musk has it backwards. The future isn't solar "with a little bit of nuclear", it's nuclear with a little bit of solar.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I have plenty of money to my name. I am not super rich but much better off than my average fellow American. Almost entirely thanks to my father and his investment in my education (yes I went to public school). You have no need for more of my personal details.
Most homes have 10, 20, and even 50 year roof & foundation warranties against build defects. It may not cost as much but that is something you are in one way or other paying up front. Similarly, the panels can have warrant, replacement, and cost rolled into the value of the house to spread across 30 years of mortgage. The HVAC, plumbing, flooring, lawn, etc are all done that way, why can't solar? We get loans for shitty assets like cars. Are panels worse?
And I am not sure what you mean by "raping you on interest". My company 401k gets a slightly better return than my current mortgage interest rate. There are mortgage rates just 1-2 percent higher than inflation. That means spending all the money now is almost no better than spending it over 30 years on a loan. Assuming you have no investment options.
Best post of thread
Not that I really wanted to get involved in this yelling contest, but let's use facts though: The majority of manufacturers offer the 25-year standard solar panel warranty, which means that power output should not be less than 80% of rated power after 25 years and they don't suddenly stop working by then.
Batteries though, maybe ten years?
And common sense would tell you: such a claim would be bullocks.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not having it all in the same area has even more advantages than just safety and security. By spreading the area out over the longitude covered by the US, the need for storage is reduced.
It doesn't matter if it's available to everyone and their little dog too. It is still a subsidy.
If power for the entire country were concentrated in one place, then it seems to me that this is an attack waiting to happen. Where is the redundancy needed for a secure operation? While the power grid in the US is vulnerable, it does have some degree of redundancy.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Thanks. TLDR for skimmers:
Their energy payback times (EPBT)—the time it takes to produce
all the energy used in their life cycles—currently are between six
months to two years, depending on the location/solar irradiation
and the technology. And with expected life times of 30 years, their
Energy Return Ratios (ERR) are in the range of 60:1 to 15:1, depending on the location and
the technology, thus returning 15 to 60 times more energy than the
energy they use.
And 30 years is considered a low-ball figure by most people, although efficiency will be lower than at the start of life it will still be around 80%, so you could assume 50 years or even 100 years (why replace 80% efficiency panels when you can keep them and colocate new panels?) which makes them excellent.
He is selling BS because he wants contract to build it. He forgets to add area around for servicing this disaster, also he would need to build few of them all over the place,in other places of US especially a bit up north, he would never get Arizona efficiency, this would require increase the area even more. Not to mention snow removal during winter and lost energy due to transport....
He is just playing with some totally stupid numbers and shows how simple something is...
Ant is stronger than man - weight to strength ratio. Lets use Ants to build buildings, or more cars...
Yeah like the 25-50 year warranties on roofs, those aren't worth the paper they're written on. They don't transfer owners, they are usually prorated after the first year and only cover manufacturer defects, don't cover workmanship, don't cover wind damage even though they're rated for hurricane speed winds, ... and that is if the company that wrote the warranty is even around by the time you need it.
25 years on a solar panel is generous. Many early commercial solar panels are already being replaced 10 years later.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Where is the data that proves this? Musk is just a capitalist.
Wikipedia: the average area of a US Walmart is about 10,000 square meters (~100,000 square feet)
Statista: There are about 5000 Walmart stores (and affilliates) in the US.
Total area: about 0.2% of what you need to get 100 miles by 100 miles.
I'm pro solar, but the scale of going 100% solar is not small.
Going on 12 years for an off-road installation in Wyoming, with all the wind and hail that implies. Batteries have lost some capacity but are still functional for at least another few years, panels themselves (Panasonic) have only dropped to 95% of their average output when first installed. Sure, the warranty won't cover wind/tornado/lightning damage, but that is what homeowners insurance is for. Considering it would have cost 14k just to bring power to the corner of the property, the off-grid solution has already paid itself off, and that takes into consideration the upcoming battery replacement.
What kind of habitat are you destroying covering up 101 square miles of land. What animals in the desert are you displasing ?
The biggest killer of solar cells is that the cells degrade.
Most degrade 50% in just one year, and those are the goods ones.
The story is a rip off of this http://www.businessinsider.com...
The problem with this theory is that electricity is only 20% of mankinds energy consumption https://www.iea.org/publicatio... each panel requires 20 grams of silver to build https://www.usatoday.com/story... so to build this solar farm would require 7.2 times all the silver on planet earth.... https://www.nationaleconomicse...
But Elon Musk, who's claim to fame is that he has fleeced more taxpayer dollars than any person in the history of mankind said it, so it must be true, right?
Murphy was an optimist
> You lose massive amounts of electricity as you ship it from PA to NYC.
Empirical, not alternative, facts:
Siemens: 500kV high voltage DC transmission losses for 800km, 6%. 800kV? 2.6%.
https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/2012-07-wismar/factsheet-hvdc-e.pdf
Pittsburgh, on the east of Pennsylvania, to NYC, is 371 miles, about 600 kilometers, on the highway.
From my understanding, panels don't really fail, other than in some pretty unique cases (i.e. a physical accident etc...), and no the lifetime is no where near 45-100 years. The "lifetime" of a panel is 10-25 years, with likely most falling into the 15-20 year time span. This is also the reason why you see renewable energy companies signing 20 year energy contracts, as it more less basically covers the lifespan (and cost) of their hardware. The "lifespan" is more of a reflection (sorry pardon pun) of effectiveness, which lowers each year, more less exponentially as the panel ages until you get to a point where the percentage of efficiency is such that it does't make much sense to keep maintaining the panel anymore from a business standpoint (that threshold can depend on what tolerances the company/site has some may try to milk out as much as they can, however will likely have to compromise in that they will have a contract stipulating they must supply at least XXX MW, and the less efficient your panels, the less power produced).
Those first array's were composed of large concave (or is it convex) panels, which while worked quite well, were difficult to replace as the age. Most new modern array's are made is many many smaller "large flat screen TV sized" panels, which can be swapped out as need be (as their efficiency drops, which can be directly measured centrally, and sending out technicians to do the work on panel R123A23P5 or whatever). So from your example, sure the ARRAY can more less be around indefinitely, however the individual panels will more less all be switched out on an approximately 20 year cycle.
Ok, just saw the FUNNY post... whatever.
I agree with everything you say (though I'm making the assumption you know about the geography etc...).
However I'll give you another reason why additional hydro locations are difficult to find. It is the same reason that the US (and others) lack a lot of off shore wind power. NIMBY. Creating new hydro locations is disruptive, and you will get a lot of opposition, enough to basically make it unfeasible. Sure geographically it might make sense, and it might make sense from a generating standpoint, however if it appears that it is traditional native lands, home to the rare top hat grasshopper, close to cottagers, or any of about an infinite number of things that people can get upset about, it will be hard pressed to move forward. These things typically take up a lot of real estate, and heck you will get people from across the country without any skin in the actual game raising concerns about of it will effect ground water levels, and possible safety issues, etc... So it might be better to say that most of the EASY hydro locations have already been developed, and it just isn't worthwhile trying to do anymore (particularly as you say with the availability of coal and gas generation which you can spin up on pretty short notice).
Then again if you're China you just make a huge one and relocate everyone anyway, but not so easy in democracies.
The whole reason/justification that the tree hugging lefist loons are using to push this save-the-planet-or-we-allz-gonna-fry bullshit is to save the environment in the first place. And here you are talking about setting up a bunch of dams and man-made reservoirs all over the place? Any leftist that agrees with you is a fucking hypocrite and a retard; there's no way they'll agree to this and the right doesn't give a shit because they have no problem just continuing to use fossil fuels.
Even if they're just in the tax code, they are subsidies.
Without those tax breaks, your tax burden would drop, and they get to benefit from the money they gain in kind.