Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ponector 290 days ago
Difference is massive, but price of land should be also accounted for. Solar uses 5 times more land per MW.

The solution is to develop everything, all kinds of renewables.

2 comments

Even the EIA-commissioned study I linked doesn't include that, but it is a potentially significant cost. If we take the median price of US$4702 per Texas "acre" from https://texasfarmcredit.com/resources/texas-land-pricing-gui... it works out to US$1.16/m². At 30° latitude your panels provide about 0.86 square meters of panel per square meter of land, or more like 0.3 with trackers, so the land price is on the order of US$3/m². A square meter is nominally a kilowatt of sunlight, so that's US$0.003/W of sunlight, but mainstream panels are usually only around 21% efficient, so it's more like US$0.015/Wp. Historically this has been insignificant but may no longer be with mainstream panels costing only US$0.10/Wp.

Desert land, lakes, and harbors are cheaper, so we should expect to see more panels there instead of on potentially arable land.

Sorry, that's Texas farmland "acres". An "acre" is a medieval unit of measure defined as one "chain" by one "furlong", the area a single man can plow in a day with a team of oxen. Although people have been plowing with horses since the 12th century, the "acre" is still in use in Texas, where it is roughly equivalent to 0.405 hectares (4050m² in SI units). In Texas, latitude ≈30°, it amounts to roughly a megawatt of solar energy (3 megawatts peak) before accounting for panel inefficiency.

Also when I said "US$0.10/Wp" I was wrong. I'm in the lazy habit of rounding US$1 = €1, but that's a significant error now. The correct price of €0.100/Wp for mainstream solar modules is more accurately US$0.117/Wp.

> An "acre" is a medieval unit of measure defined as one "chain" by one "furlong", the area a single man can plow in a day with a team of oxen. Although people have been plowing with horses since the 12th century, the "acre" is still in use in Texas...

1) People plowed with oxen well into the 20th century. Most places, only fancy people could afford horses at least into the 17th-18th century. So not so totally-medieval.

2) The acre is used in all kinds of backwards (Anglophone) places, not only Texas. All of the USA for starters, probably Australia, maybe the UK... Heck, I remember my elders using the (roughly) corresponding "tunnland" in daily conversation in Sweden as late as the 1970s. (But yeah, they were really rather elderly.)

3) Aren't you the guy who should call that "the 0012th century"? (Sorry if I'm getting you mixed up with someone else.)

Agreed on all points! (Except "should".)
You can buy land in the desert for under $1000 an acre. There are places you can buy farmland for under $10000 an acre.