“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)]
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?
Indeed, what are we waiting for? Dams could be reduced allowing for normal fish production, costs
could, not
would, be much lower - and ideally this would be set up in two places - one goes out and the other comes on line. Even state by state for places with enough sun, this could be done and be much harder to take out.
What a wonderful concept! Five stars and blessings for posting this!
No, Pooka, The production cost of hydro is less than one cent per kilowat hour. Compare this with the cost of other energy generation sustems :
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link to www.wvic.com]
It is the most reliable power, not subject to the interruptions of solar.
From Planet Save:
"According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), hydropower is the most flexible source of power generation available. It is also capable of responding to demand fluctuations in a short time sequence.
“Although other plants, notably conventional thermal power plants, can respond to load fluctuations, their response times are not as fast and often are not as flexible over their full output band. In addition to grid flexibility and security services (spinning reserve), hydropower dams with large reservoir storage be used to store energy over time to meet system peaks or demand decoupled from inflows. Storage can be over days, weeks, months, seasons or even years depending on the size of the reservoir.
...
“Hydropower is the only large-scale and cost-efficient storage technology available today. Despite promising developments in other energy storage technologies, hydropower is still the only technology offering economically viable large-scale storage. It is also a relatively efficient energy storage option.””"
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link to planetsave.com (secure)]
A chart on the above link show the relative costs of different types of energy show solar to be approximately 7 times that of hydro.
"THe above chart shows the relatively low cost of hydro in terms of maintenance, operations, and fuel costs when compared with other electricity sources and across a full project lifetime. For hydro projects, a longer lifespan (the Navigant study assumed 50 years) means not only are costs spread across a longer timeframe but also takes into account that the power generating equipment used at these facilities can often operate for long periods of time without needing major replacements or repairs."
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link to planetsave.com (secure)]
People, you have been lied to over and over and over again.
It would not be cheaper to replace hydro with solar or other electical generation means.
At this point, the combined contribution to the nation's energy grid of solar, wind, and biomass is less than 1% - .1% to b e exact. In other words, practically nil.
If solar was that feasible, it would contribute at least 5% by now.
The solar lobby has been promising affordable solar in about 2 years since the 1970s. If this was a fact, we could all be enjoying the benefots of solar right now.
