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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."
So, doable? Yeah, could be done. Cheap and easy? Not hardly.....
I think that's how I remember it... "Ask not what your country can do for you, because we only do what's cheap and easy." Must be the new American anthem.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
~$1.5T for the solar panels
If you think of that as less than 2 years of the US military budget, for hardware which could last 20+ years, that actually doesn't sound so bad.
I imagine the batteries would be really expensive right now though.
The fact that he is a billionaire and willing to spend money on such a project speaks volumes to his humanity. Re: buffett, gates, etc
It's a great stimulus programme too. Spread them around the country, create jobs, manufacturing, on-going maintenance etc.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't forget that solar panels take more energy to make (fab the silicon, build the frames) than they ever will recover in their useful life.
Patently false, as the quickest of Google searches would have told you..
https://understandsolar.com/so...
Right. So you really think that if he spent all his own money, built it, and then went to the government and asked them to reimburse him...they'd say yes and foot the bill to the taxpayers?
They'd bitch. They'd moan. They'd form a few committees made out of people who don't know anything about solar, who invest in oil, or who think that the earth is going to end in the next century via divine intervention. Then they'd say they needed to observe the solar plant for a few years to verify it did what it was supposed to do. Then they'd offer to pay for 1/4 of the station on the condition that Musk builds a coal power plant for backup for the battery backup.
Yeah, can't imagine why he isn't going to "Build it first and trust in the government."
Hello traveler and welcome to 2010. A lot has changed in the 30 years since you were in a coma. It's not all going to be good. For instance:
- The UK is leaving the EU. Yeah surprise I know they just joined when you were last awake.
- The depression everyone is talking about is not the great depression but a more recent one.
- An internet (this giant network of computers (things that do work for people) ) search engine is sucking up the world's data and selling it to advertisers.
- Donald Trump is president of the USA.
- The worlds most valuable company sells overpriced mobile phones and people happily queue to buy them.
- No really! Donald Trump, THE Donald Trump is president.
But it's not all bad. One of the good things is the Energy Payback Period for manufactured solar cells has dropped from 40 years to less than half a year. Probably even lower now as this article is already 7 years old http://www.clca.columbia.edu/2....
Anyway if you don't like that article you can use that search engine thing I was talking about (it's called Google BTW (that's how the cool kids say "By The Way" these days) ) to search that internet thing I was talking about for more references about how wrong and outdated your views are.
Oh and for a brief period the best rapper was a white person. But don't worry it went back to ... normal.
That's exactly the problem. Fossil fuels are not paying for the damage they do to health and the environment. They get to spew pollution and everybody else has to subsidize the damage.
Fossil fuels shouldn't be allowed to free ride on everyone else.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
LOL.. That's from Tesla Power's PR campaign.
In case you haven't noticed, they haven't turned much of a profit yet and they are desperate to keep the stock price up to PE ratios that will make your nose bleed. They are just trying to forestall the inevitable stampede of sellers should it become apparent this whole idea isn't working out from the profit and loss perspective....Therefore, they and Tesla are hyping the stock (pump and dump kind of thing), which is what Musk is up to here. He's just trying to keep his fortune in Tesla Stock (that he couldn't sell if he wanted too) as high as he can, hoping beyond hope that eventually it turns a profit worthy of the stock price.
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