[dontreact]

This is interesting. It seems like sidestepping a problem which needs to be attacked head-on: the amount of solar we need to build is more than what can be built in invisible areas isn't it? Perhaps this helps to get things going for now but can we actually build enough in areas with no visibility from residential?

[gumby]

The amount of land required isn't that high. Nate Lewis at Cal Tech once told me that "the amount of light falling on the numbered highways of the USA can generate more power than the US's entire generating capacity.

Of course he didn't mean that we should cover all the highways; it just says we could afford to build and maintain them all and have that much land area, so building an equivalent area of solar would be both cheaper and feasible.

That was over a decade ago; solar is both cheaper and more efficient. IIRC something small like a hundred km2 or so of desert would do the trick. We spend much more of that growing corn that we wastefully turn into fuel.

[vlovich123]

I think only if you ignore distribution and overall grid integration which would constrain where you can place solar plants and ignore that in the winter you’re not going to get much power production from the North East and PNW regions (and when you do it’s super spotty).

By that logic of ignoring constraints, nuclear takes 0 land area compared to solar and could generate more power than solar panels we’d ever produce.

[gumby]

Were you replying to my note? The point, as I noted, is not to say "just stick them where the roads are" but rather as a sort of Fermi estimate -- the cost of deployment is demonstrably quite feasible. Whether people want to do it or not is unrelated.

FWIW there are a lot of deserts and plains that can be used for year round generation.

[vlovich123]

My point is that the fermi approximation is flawed because HVDC is still extremely expensive to transmit power from places where solar is plentiful to where it’s needed. So there are significant real world implications that make the approximation off probably by an order of magnitude. There’s a lot of solar energy but effectively time and distance shifting it turns out to be extremely difficult and expensive. That’s why solar and wind continue struggling to replace fossil fuels in the grid (modulo places like California, Florida and Texas with abundant sunshine throughout the state) despite the generators themselves being cheaper than ever; all they’ve managed to do is absorb daytime energy growth. It’s something but our absolute fossil fuel consumption in the grid has continued to grow substantially even if as a percentage it managed to stagnate or marginally decrease. Nuclear continues to have far more success at actually replacing fossil fuels in the grid, has meaningfully less land footprint than solar, and while gen iii reactors require some work to maintain safety, it still remains remarkably safe per mwh comparable to solar and gen iv reactors have fail safe designs that don’t carry any of the same maintenance concerns. We gave up on nuclear fission too early and easily due to FUD from the coal industry and it still remains the better path to fix the grid’s contribution to global warming.

[specialist]

Yes and: IIRC, just 1/4 of the space devoted to golf courses.

[dontreact]

I guess my question is:

Does this work address a specious, disingenuous argument that is being put forth by NIMBYs to block solar installation, so does it address a real pain point?

I agree we should be able to build enough solar but does this work address a real bottleneck or a fake problem presented as real by people with ulterior motives?

[jvanderbot]

How often do you see farm fields, for example?

We could easily find many many large expanses of land, and given the margins on farming, many in my local area are renting / selling / building solar farms on the corners or harder-to-reach areas of their fields. Since those areas tend to have trees around anyway .... But none of that is really a viewshed problem unless you've modelled trees.

Now in hillier areas or mountainous regions this gets more compliated.

[parpfish]

My rural community has a solar farm going in, and it is not going over well.

Lots of NIMBYs that “did their own research” to conclude that solar is actually bad for the environment or uneconomical or whatever. But the real reason for their rage is that they see it as a physical manifestation of the spread of “progressive ideas” and for that reason alone it must be stopped