[tmellon2]

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.

[paxys]

Not 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.

[RealityVoid]

As 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.

[jeffbee]

10k 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]

I 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]

1 trillion disappears mysteriously into the USA economy every week.

[chasd00]

that'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.

[triceratops]

> 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]

White Sands Missile Range alone is ~3200 square miles.

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]

What 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]

Currently 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]

Or 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]

There 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]

I 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]

It 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.

[tmellon2]

Thank 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]

People of a certain world outlook will listen to Musk when they'll ignore more enlightened commentators. That's a good thing.

[eYrKEC2]

> Elon Musk mentioned [...]

He didn't say Elon was the origin.

[chinathrow]

Meanwhile he is burning jet fuel to power is AI cluster.

A clusterfuck of priorities.