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

How do you get 850Kwh = 28 panels...

I have a solar system at my home. 1 panel generates 100 Watts per hour. At 10 hours that would be 1Kwh per panel. So that would mean 28Kwh for 28 panels. Even if you had a more powerful array of panels that gave you 200 Watts per panel, you'd still have only 56Kwh from the array and not 850Kwh...

"100 square miles" means: a square 10 miles by 10 miles on a side.
(a square with sides that are 10 miles long.)

You are exactly correct. Storage solutions are the problem.

I have a solar panel system and batteries don't last 10 years. I'm lucky to get 4 or 5 years from them and they degrade in storage capacity as they are used. Then the cost of the batteries are getting more expensive. There has to be a better storage solution that is cheaper...

Will only work in daytime.

I hear ya and agree that Solar is not the way to go for powering the Power Grid. It's better to power individual homes with solar, like a stand alone system, for emergency purposes..

As of your math on solar panels having a 25% turn out depends on how much solar energy your panel can absorb in a day as well as what type of controller your using...

I get 10-12 hours of sunlight a day depending on the season. My panels generate power when the sun is just 5 degrees off the horizon because I use a MPPT charge controller. If you used a PWM Controller, you'd have to wait for a voltage difference in order for the panels and PWM controller to operate. Therefore, the sun would have to be over 15 degrees in order for the Panels to operate, using a PWM Controller. To compensate for this, many people will use servo motors to angle the panels to follow the sun. With an MPPT Controller, it is not needed...

As a result, I'm able to generate the full 100 Watt/hours per panel for 10 hours = 1KWh per panel for the day...

You have NO CLUE about what you are saying.

OP you could not even run 1 state not even ! with 100 x 100 miles of solar panels with today's tech you are misguided at best.

It's just another of Elon Musk's ideas which never seem to actually amount to anything:

Elon and the collective
[link to blog.piekniewski.info (secure)]

^^^ THIS!

10,000 sq. miles would engulf Washington D.C. and Virginia.
let's do it.

Tesla also regularly meets with first responders and donates its cars for training purposes. But there’s only so much that can be done once battery cells begin to spontaneously explode. The company’s online emergency response guide notes: “Battery fires can take up to 24 hours to extinguish. Consider allowing the battery to burn while protecting exposures.”

One of the first things first responders learn: Never cut an orange cable, a color reserved for wiring in excess of 60 volts. These can be found not just in the front or rear of a car but also running behind side panels.
Safety experts say the only way to extinguish a lithium-ion battery inside a car is with thousands of gallons of water, much more than what it takes to stop a fire in a typical gasoline engine. The other option is to just let it burn itself out. “It’s such a difficult fire because it takes so much water to put out,”


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

There is a slight problem with the math...

Power from the panels is only for 10 - 12 hours maximum and not 24 hours. Also, in practicality, you can't put that many panels that close together. You have to space them in rows so that they could be serviced. The heat dissipation from the panels is another factor that limits the output of the panels. You have to space them for air flow...

I would not place them in a desert, due to the heat. There are upper temperature limits to these panels. If you increase these specs to NASA kind of specs (used on satellites), that would increase the costs drastically per panel...

Assuming the solar panels were one metre square, there would be about 25 billion of them, which would require some maintenance.

Meanwhile, Musk's Solar City can't even get their solar house tiles to work.

9 pages of totally useless debate. And, shitty math in the OP.

It may not be a sin to be stupid, but to be ignorant, stupid and refuse to better yourself is. It takes a really, really, really lazy piece of shit to refuse to learn basic math.


Your perfection in all learnable subjects is duly noted.

Sounds like communism. Central planning. One big power factory. That’s how the Soviet did things

certainly not one big one for the whole country.

but this shows that regional solar panel farms are certainly feasible.

solar light drops 700 to 1000 watts of Energy continuously,
per square meter, when the sun is shining.

hell yes we should capture much of that and put it to use.

Zero point energy is a violent way to produce power. Basically you have to cause a tear or flaw in this dimension so that a rush of information attempts to fill the hole created.That rush to fill the artificial void produce tremendous energy...if we master it we will become a level 3 existence.

Yes, but until recently, most ignored that there isn't only solar light radiation hitting earth, some of which we capture, some of which gets reflected and some of which gets absorbed by earth and heats up the planet.

The planet not being at absolute zero, because the sun heats it up, also emits a lot of infrared radiation towards empty space which can be harnessed, especially at night times.


The technology required for that is arrays of optical/infrared nano rectennas (rectifying antenna) which is basically a nano sized antenna with one or more nano sized diodes.
Usually MIM diodes are used which are quantum tunneling diodes, more suited for this purpose.

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]


The problem with this technology currently, as it appears to me, isn't the nano antennas but the rectifying diodes. The nano antennas already seem to reach a higher than 80% efficiency.
The specifications required for the diodes however in order to reach efficiencies of over 50% are immense, this being currently at the forefront of experimentation/research


But if successful and they finally manage to produce the required diodes at high enough efficiencies, in theory, you could have solar panels which at day time absorb the incoming sun rays and at night time absorb the infrared radiation emitted by earth into empty space at all times.

You could also have clothing with infrared nano rectennas weaved in, such that they would absorb a great portion of the infrared radiation your body emits at all times. Enough radiation to charge your smartphone for example several times over per day.


If this technology succeeds in the near future, it will be a game changer since earth emits infrared radiation at all times, independent of day or night or weather. It would make batteries obsolete for the most part.



With all such technology however, it is also extremely useful to the military. There are already experiments trying to use this technology to power micro drones just from the environment, without requiring any refueling, which is why there is a chance that a breakthrough already occurred but kept secret.

You can use it to directly heat water in a home. Electricity is not the answer to everything.

yeah but you create more plumbing and storage problems. An electric on demand doesn't burn that much wattage...

Looks like AOC math. 100 x 100 = 100?

yeah, OK.

Here is a related Article to the above, outlining the main problem briefly

"Headlines: Harvesting Earth’s Infrared Energy Proposed by Harvard Physicists"



[link to www.21stcentech.com (secure)]


that Article is from 2014 and there has been and is a lot of research going on to tackle the above issue

{quote:]The use of broadband antennas for collecting MID-IR
infrared Earth’s energy has a big potential advantage.
Even though the tunneling process is femtosecond fast,
MIM tunnel diodes are frequency limited due to their
large RC time constant. Searching for a diode suitable
for solar rectification, in addition to high speed and
responsivity, the goal must be a device that has a
combination of lower resistance and lower capacitance
than the existing MIM diodes. Moreover, further
research activities have to be fulfilled to identify the
suitable materials and technology for the design and
fabrication of efficient THz rectifiers.


Another paper related to this and also describing the main issue being the diodes which are not up to spec yet

[link to www.researchgate.net (secure)]

[link to phys.org (secure)]

there is no energy source at the Planck scale level.

This entire fucking post is 100 pecent bullshit.

Lets see, add up all the square footage of solar panel currently in use in the US..

Hmm.. much more than OPs stupid post, yet we are still where we are.

What bullshit.

You people have no understanding of science, physics, electricity, none of it.

Fuck it, this is like talking to a potato about fine art.

It's like saying the entire planet's population could fit in Texas.
Soon will come a day when the ones who seek
to control and weaponize technology will be gone.

Last Edited by hillbilly on 04/01/2019 10:11 AM