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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."
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)
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
"Do that, prove it works, then come to the taxpayers."
Already done on a small scale (every fully solar-powered off-grid home in the USA,) it's proven to easily scale up (various types of solar plants eist in various form factors) and taxpayers have already been paying for it as-is.
How about instead of waiting on Elon to save your ass, you do it yourself?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
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.
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 [independent.co.uk] batteries for grid storage.
I never made that assumption. I just referenced the gigafactory because this article is about Musk. And second those batteries are to be used for load balancing and not grid level storage. And just for a little math. The US uses almost 4000 tWh of electricity annually which divided by 365 is ~11 tWh. That is 11 tWh for a single day of storage. That plant can only store 100 mWh. How many of those plants would we have to build for two weeks worth of storage? Is that even a feasible solution?
What options do you think are "better and cheaper" in the long run? Nuclear fission will never happen for political reasons if nothing else.
Of course nuclear fission is the answer. The world's leading climate scientists have called it the only viable path forward on climate change. The political reasons generally involve huge amounts fossil fuel industry money spent on anti-nuclear propaganda. Not only do I think nuclear is the least worst option available, I think it is actually a good option. It is the safest, cleanest energy source with the smallest environmental footprint. Look at nuclear energy startups such as Terrapower, NuScale, Terrestrial energy, etc. Their reactors are meltdown proof and recycle waste. They can be factory built which will further reduce costs. They can be run sustainably for 10000's of years.
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?
Well we know nuclear will work, and it is the cleanest source of electricity. Why not invest in that?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.