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Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The U
by tmellon2 7mo ago
Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The USA of yesteryear would have done this already and more. Sure other sources are required, but honestly we humans have to advance beyond burning dead things for fuel.
- chinathrow 7mo agoMeanwhile he is burning jet fuel to power is AI cluster. A clusterfuck of priorities.
- paxys 7mo agoNot 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2. Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
- jeffbee 7mo ago10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.
- citrin_ru 7mo agoI trillion is going to dispersal in the AI black hole in the next couple years (in the US), I wish the same money were invested in the clean energy instead.
- jeffbee 7mo ago1 trillion disappears mysteriously into the USA economy every week.
- chasd00 7mo agothat's a very nice target to cause a country wide blackout, just saying. It's probably better to built a thousand 10 square mile power plants.
- RealityVoid 7mo agoAs the Technology Connections dude highlighted, yearly, there are about 50 000 square miles used for ethanol fuel cultivation. We do much bigger and less efficient things for fuel. Distributing this all over the country seems much less pipe dreamy than you assert. Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
- triceratops 7mo ago> This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined That isn't a lot. New Mexico alone can fit about 100 Rhode Islands. And NM isn't even the largest thinly-populated sunny state in the union.
- jcims 7mo agoWhite Sands Missile Range alone is ~3200 square miles. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/White_Sands_Missile_Range_location.gif/330px-White_Sands_Missile_Range_location.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Wh... If you dedicated a single (average sized) county per state to solar you'd ~3-5x the land you need for current consumption.
- tootie 7mo agoWhat is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.
- bb88 7mo agoCurrently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms. Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point. The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
- morepork 7mo agoOr alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere
- tadfisher 7mo agoThere are 13,000 square miles of dedicated parking lots in the United States. Covering these gets you a double-whammy of keeping heat out of the ground and generating power.
- KaiserPro 7mo agoI mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number. I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s. the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
- jeffbee 7mo agoIt bothers me that you attribute this to Elon Musk. This has been obvious to everyone for 75 years or more. The lecturer in my freshman thermodynamics class mentioned it, 35 years ago. In 1999, NREL scientists writing in the journal Science under the title "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future" made the specific claim about 10000 square miles.
- eYrKEC2 7mo ago> Elon Musk mentioned [...] He didn't say Elon was the origin.
- tmellon2 7mo agoThank you. I was not aware of prior references especially that it could be done with 10K square miles, until media reports of Elon's speech at Davos recently.
- iso1631 7mo agoPeople of a certain world outlook will listen to Musk when they'll ignore more enlightened commentators. That's a good thing.