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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."
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.
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
It won't be in the same area. Not once we have our solar-powered, transparent border wall.
Ya, but the Sun is overhead and walls are vertical so we'll have to tip the whole planet to get maximum efficiency. That will be a huge PITA with stuff sliding around, rolling off tables and such.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
~$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.
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...
Okay, let's do some Fermi math.
The US uses about 4 trillion kWh/year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But given a sufficient number of solar panels we only need to store enough for about 12 hours. 4 trillion / (365 * 2) = about 5.5 billion kWh, or 5.5 trillion Wh.
Watt hours to mAh is (Wh)*1000/(V) =(mAh): https://milliamps-watts.appspo...
The US generally uses 120 volts for power so that would be 45.6 trillion mAh.
I have on the desk in front of me a phone with a battery that holds about 3000 mAh and when stood on end takes up a surface area of about 618 mm^2.
45.6 trillion mAh / 3000 mAh/phone = 15.2 billion phones * 618 mm^2 = 9.4 trillion mm^2.
There are 1,000,000 mm^2 / m^2 so that would be 9.4 million m^2, and there are about 2.59 million meters per square mile, so 9.4 million / 2.59 million = 3.6 square miles.
So in order to get in down to one square mile you'd need a stack of phones four deep. This phone happens to be 129 mm high, so a stack of 4 would be 516 mm, or about 1 foot, 8 inches.
On the one hand you'd also need a lot of infrastucture to support those batteries which would also take up some area. However i'm also pretty sure that connecting over 15 billion phones in series would be far from the most efficient way to get the required battery storage.
I believe all that math works out?
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"Ya, but the Sun is overhead and walls are vertical so we'll have to tip the whole planet to get maximum efficiency. That will be a huge PITA with stuff sliding around, rolling off tables and such."
Congress will handle that. Just as soon as they fix health care, eliminate all taxation, straighten out the Middle East, and restore American manufacturing to its proper place in the world.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
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.