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."

Comments

Double Checking

[rjstanford]

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.

Re:Double Checking

[Maury Markowitz]

It is worth putting this into perspective:

The US has about 16 million hectares of pavement.

100 by 100 miles is about 2.6 million hectares.

The problem is still grid storage

[atomicalgebra]

Solar has a very low capacity factor (~20%-30%) which means we need to find a way to store the electricity. The majority of storage is done thru pumped-hydro. Most of those locations are already tapped. Batteries won't solve it either. Tesla's gigafactory is not going to be able to produce enough batteries for grid level storage. Current storage can be counted in the minutes, but we will need several weeks of storage to make this plan viable.

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.

2 birds, 1 stone?

[Darth Twon]

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