Only 100 square miles of solar panels are required to power the entire United States

Actually one of the submitted wall designs included solar panels.

Border wall would be at least the lengrh of the border, 1954 miles.

The entire 100 sq. mi. Goal could be accomplished by a uniform panel width of 90 yards along the wall. thats pretty wide so maybe only a fraction of the goal is doable.

If all done at the same location your looking at same new weather patterns.

Solar panels suck for anything but offgrid living. Use solar collectors. They focus mirrors onto a steam driven tower and use technology we already produce.

This is such BS....the largest solar farm in America is 4,000 acres and doesn't even generate enough energy to power the NY subway!!!

Listen to this guest at 4:02

But we would all be restricted to our use right? Because I don't believe for a minute we would have as much use as we have now and the opportunity to use more in the future.

Besides, think of the ecological damage 100 sq miles of a frying pan will do.

Our power generating technologies are so archaic.

Even our nuclear power plants are nothing but expensive steam engines.

You've never lived in a desert.

There most definitely is hail storms.

There is ZERO chance this could be true.

OP, what is the underlying need you think there is to do this?
You could fit the entire nations trash into the same area too but what would be the need to do that? You are proposing a solution in search of a non-existant problem.

Not to mention, what do you think would become the #1 target in the US for military or terrorist strike? What happens to the nation if a few hijacked planes crash into this network of solar panels or a couple of cruise missiles strike them?

Uh 10 miles by 10 miles is 100 square miles. I'm pretty sure. I'll go break out an old Calculus textbook just in case.

Looks like they use some kind of free piston or linear alternator to generate electricity. They do not care about the heat source but in this case they use solar.

Unbelievable that anyone would buy into this story. There are already massive solar power plants in NV and AZ and >>> There are also massive windfarms covering thousands of acres each equipped with massive multi-million dollar wind turbines.

All these hugely expensive efforts at renewable energy provide a drop in the bucket in the total energy picture.

Solar panels on every house is not a bad idea-maybe. Currently, it takes about 15 years for a big residential system to pay for itself in savings. How long to the break-even point after government mandates? I would guess about 40 years. Such a massive program would still provide a small fraction of the required electricity. Of course, just covering housing rooftops would mean emplacing thousands of square miles of solar panels.

Those that bought into this idea really need to get out more.

The title should say "A square 100 miles on each side". The actual article says:


“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,” Musk said at at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”

If they were not blocking the sun.
Everyone I know is having trouble with the solar uptake with thire panales.

No chance.

I call BS

That could not even power Las Vegas!

Don't fuck with my power source!

What do you taste like?

It's 2019 and we're still using old tech. I mean c'mon not one significant piece of technology has not been released except phones. Where are all the inventions and innovation.im pretty certain there is technology that is better or can be worked on sitting in the patent office.there are several alternative energy groups online and on YouTube that are really innovative and some successful and of course you have fakers and b/s, I see things about geet engines and magnet motors and various other devices that could be sponsored by the government or possibly funded by various groups to explore if these things work or can get improved on.i think this solar panel thing might be a bad idea, we don't know the effects on the environment when you bounce all the sun rays back up into the atmosphere in one concentrated area or do we? I think we need to put more effort into these things instead of all the political drama and hollywood nonsense. Someone should start a alternative energy thread on here I'm sure GLP could figure it out if you pooled resources and legitimate scientist and engineers which I know visit here, I think we could figure something out?

You know what’s funny to me is people seem to think that petroleum only powers their car or house. Petroleum is 99% of your life. So what are you gonna make shit out of stoopids?

No way this is possible.Solar is not viable on large scale.Tptb block the sun also.Its cloudy or rainy half the time now.

Google
Everything is made out of oil
And then cry

this doesnt cover baseline power though right ?

Distributed power systems are the most practical, individual or small community systems that don't require large distribution systems. We have lots of cheap ways to produce power, solar and wind are among those but the problem is STORAGE. Develop affordable storage and most everyone will say adios to the power company. We should be investing massive research dollars into batteries. Affordable storage solves everything

So moran, what are you going to do about increased cloud nucleation??

Large scale power, (> 100 meg watt), from solar is only viable from solar thermal, ie: focus sunlight on a boiler to steam turbine.

Battery storage is also too costly, best for large scale is thermal storage for short term. Long term is electrolysis to hydrogen, then either fuel cell or thermal to boiler.

There's a lot of propaganda on both sides of the fence on "solar power".



Solar thermal example. Note they are using a very costly way to focus light. There are designs that are a fraction of the cost shown here.

[link to www.amusingplanet.com (secure)]

Last Edited by Remedial_Rebel on 03/31/2019 12:46 PM

Good post OP!

This should bring the fossil fuel shills out in force!

It goes clear back to the 1970s. I have a stack of books from then in the basement with the same old promises. I'm still waiting to see those promises bear fruit for the public. They bear fruit only for the politicisns and the grantees.
Solar on a large scale is a field of dreams.
How short peoples' memories are. We went through a renewabled binge during the Bush and Obama years. Remember Solyndra?

yeah no...here in NV we have the largest solar farm on the planet...its about 8 miles or worth of solar panels, it only powers about 3% of las vegas power, and some gets corded off to san berno