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> However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering a

> However, this is an uninteresting metric in a world with so much unused land What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants? You're shifting goalposts here. The technology you favor doesn't exist on the scale needed, any more than breeder reactors do. The French Superphénix experimental breeder reactor produced 1.2 GW of electricity, in 1985. That's more than any solar installation in the world except for one.

Jweb_Guru 5y ago
> What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants? Probably "wow, thanks for using all that desert?" The environmental argument against solar is by far the weakest out there given that literally every other alternative has substantially worse externalities (whether you think the risks of nuclear waste are worth it or not--I'd imagine most of us do--they obviously exist!). I'd actually go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who claim they are against large solar deployments for environmental reasons are arguing in bad faith. I do not understand what you're saying as far as "scalability" required of solar farms. What challenges of scale do you think will exist? Solar does not have economies of scale in terms of deployment, only construction (and it is already cheap enough, without subsidies, to undercut fossil fuels in many countries). Deploying a large or small farm scales basically linearly in the number of solar panels, until it becomes such a large fraction of the grid that storage becomes a concern (which we are nowhere close to). This is not comparable to the obvious challenges of mining and processing enormous amounts of seawater (which takes a long time to mix thoroughly and for which we still don't have a good way of actually isolating the uranium) compared to small amounts. Again, many informed people have issues with solar, but none of their issue is that it couldn't provide the power required. The reason there are not larger solar deployments is that people have not invested in larger solar farms, not that there is some scalability or economic limit; a large farm being a fraction of the size of some nuclear plants is pretty meaningless, considering that it costs proportionally less than the same nuclear plant (which is why I bought up square footage--because that's the only metric by which trying to argue that a single nuclear plant generating more electricity than a large solar farm actually means anything). There is absolutely no technical hurdle there, and frankly I can't really imagine what you think the technical hurdle would be.

Jweb_Guru 5y ago

> What do you suppose environmentalists are going to say when you start covering all that "unused land" (which they call "wilderness") with solar plants? Probably "wow, thanks for using all that desert?" The environmental argument against solar is by far the weakest out there given that literally every other alternative has substantially worse externalities (whether you think the risks of nuclear waste are worth it or not--I'd imagine most of us do--they obviously exist!). I'd actually go so far as to say that the vast majority of people who claim they are against large solar deployments for environmental reasons are arguing in bad faith. I do not understand what you're saying as far as "scalability" required of solar farms. What challenges of scale do you think will exist? Solar does not have economies of scale in terms of deployment, only construction (and it is already cheap enough, without subsidies, to undercut fossil fuels in many countries). Deploying a large or small farm scales basically linearly in the number of solar panels, until it becomes such a large fraction of the grid that storage becomes a concern (which we are nowhere close to). This is not comparable to the obvious challenges of mining and processing enormous amounts of seawater (which takes a long time to mix thoroughly and for which we still don't have a good way of actually isolating the uranium) compared to small amounts. Again, many informed people have issues with solar, but none of their issue is that it couldn't provide the power required. The reason there are not larger solar deployments is that people have not invested in larger solar farms, not that there is some scalability or economic limit; a large farm being a fraction of the size of some nuclear plants is pretty meaningless, considering that it costs proportionally less than the same nuclear plant (which is why I bought up square footage--because that's the only metric by which trying to argue that a single nuclear plant generating more electricity than a large solar farm actually means anything). There is absolutely no technical hurdle there, and frankly I can't really imagine what you think the technical hurdle would be.