[chgs]

One larger cost you might think of with solar is land - but even in the U.K. where land isn’t exactly cheap leasing prices are about £1k an acre per year, and an acre will generate about 350MWh a year, so that’s well under 1 cent per kWh, so it’s lost in the noise.

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/alternative-land-uses-leasing...

[kragen]

where land cost comes in is that it forces you to put solar generation far away from energy consumption, which incurs transmission and distribution costs which can be several times larger than the cost of the generation itself, as documented elsewhere in this thread for urumqi

as an example, a 100-megawatt electric arc furnace might occupy 1000 square meters, and it's amenable to solar's intermittent energy supply in a way that blast furnaces aren't, but even at the ideal kilowatt per square meter, it needs 100 000 square meters of solar panels to power it, about ten city blocks. more plausibly it needs several times that. you can't physically fit those panels closer than hundreds of meters from the arc furnace, and land costs mean you probably have to put them out in the countryside, likely tens of kilometers away

[Retric]

Yea and that 0.3c/kWh land cost is in the UK which is a terrible fit for nuclear.

[Retric]

Ops, make that “fit for solar”

[kragen]

aha, that makes sense