The 100 square miles of solar panels in Arizona was simply an example for scale... What you would actually do is use all of the existing modern structures roof area, which is very likely some factor greater up to perhaps an order more than the 100 square miles of surface area... Then humanity gets new super powers of excess energy and needs far less storage for overnights or overcast and less windy weeks or seasons. Other people have done the same calculations as Elons Master Plan Part 3... Check out "tony seba renewable energy" for some more robust data. We do not need to match storage to production capacity it turns out... Anyway, just thought I would throw that out there, He didn't literally mean 100 contiguous square miles in Arizona...
On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 2:53 PM paul dove via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: > Yes, he stated they would need storage facilities, that’s obvious because > of nightfall. > > On Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 6:28 PM, Michael Ross < > michael.e.r...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Musk proposed a seat of the pants estimate in an interview about how much > solar array surface area would produce as much energy as THE ENTIRE HUMAN > RACE. > He used the output of average solar equipment at less than optimal > output (I forget, maybe it was 15% efficient cells). > I did my own seat of the pants order of magnitude estimate, looking at all > the fossil fuels burned, nuke generated energy, geothermal, hydro, etc. I > think he could defend it. > However, it is not practical. The sun moves across the sky at a degree > every 4 minutes. You can get pretty good output from contemporaneous panels > that are at a 30 degree incident angle. You need to have additional 100 > mile on a side solar farms spaced appropriately around the entire earth and > the wire infrastructure to support it. You would need some redundancy to > handle cloudiness. Or maybe a feces load of batteries, pump storage, > gravity storage, something storage. Suffice it to say you have to have a > lot of these arrays all around the earth, and maybe between the tropics of > cancer and capricorn. Tricky 'cause there is a lot of ocean out there. > I found his thought experiment useful to highlight just how much power the > sun sends our way. You can barely see a 100 mile square plot of lane from > space. It is truly tine compared to the surface of the earth. > On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 6:43 PM paul dove <dov...@bellsouth.net> wrote: > > Elon Musk said he can power the whole US with 100 square miles on solar > panels in Arizona > SNIP > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20231108/04d7abd3/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ Address messages to ev@lists.evdl.org No other addresses in TO and CC fields HELP: http://www.evdl.org/help/
