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

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.