Leasing land for solar installations is popular with rural land owners. Or at least popular enough that there's rarely an issue finding enough willing owners to develop a new project.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
Have you seen the logistics required to move the output of 15,000 acres of food to the consumer?
A 15,000 acre solar farm generates 6000GWh a year, which can be moved via a single high voltage pylon.
Of course you don't need to move it to California, as you can power an Iowa data centre, or Chicago, instead.
People may pay more to ship "Florida Oranges" or "California wine" across the country. They won't with electric, they'll just buy locally, and if prices reduce then people will use more (building new data centres is the current vogue, but factories and other industry)
Iowa being a net energy exporter means more economic opportunities for Iowa
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
operating at median loads, transmission losses over a distance of 1,000 miles generally range between 6% and 15%
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
No one electron goes the 1600 mile distance. An increase of cheap energy supply in one place lowers likelihood of production elsewhere, but it is more diffuse than selling Iowan energy in California.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."