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06:01 PM
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Only 100 square miles of solar panels are required to power the entire United States
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In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss and no more than 50% of the source material, provide a link back to the original article and provide your original comments / criticism in your post with the article.
[quote:Anonymous Coward 77492469:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNjI5MjMwXzgzQTQxMDhF] [quote:Anonymous Coward 77522696:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNjI0NjI5XzE2MDBFOTZB] [quote:Anonymous Coward 77492469:MV80MDEwMDY5XzcyNjE4OTM4XzdFMzY2QUU4] the problem with solar power is that there is always the chance of having a streak of clouds for a week or longer. What will you do then, when you produce almost no energy? You would have to find a method which can store the output of a week or even longer. The easiest method would be to use electrolysis and turn water into hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen back into water whenever the sun is not shining. [/quote] In rainy days (heavy cloud cover), solar panel output is around 25% - it doesn't really fall to zero. Additional storage requirements can be reduced or eliminated to cover for that contingency if the number of panels is increased to 2x-4x. [/quote] Not my experience, having a 10kw system on my roof. There are rainy days with heavy clouds the system will produce less than 10% of its normal output. I had two days in december where i only got 2kwh vs 20-25kwh when the sky was very clear. While unlikely to get a whole week of such cloudy days, it is not impossible and you have to have some method to account for such cases. [/quote]
Original Message
“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,”
“The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”
It’s “a little square on the U.S. map, and then there’s a little pixel inside there, and that’s the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny.”
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link to www.inverse.com (secure)
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If this were spread over the United States connected by a power grid sounds doable and not very intrusive, the panels also being on top of building roofs.. What we waiting for?
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