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Citation needed here since there is good information that says otherwise, article here, but essentially power companies began to ditch CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) boiling salt/water plants for PVC power fields since operating costs are lower and initial outlay expenses are lower now too.
Citation needed. Bear in mind that many of the common affordable panels aren't using the truly rare "rare earths" and they're recyclicable too. Also bear in mind new PVC tech, like the perovskite based stuff that is coming out of R&D now, doesn't even need any rare earths at all to work. Sure the efficiency is bad compared to most current panels but its so much cheaper that it doesn't much matter since you can buy 2 or 3 panels for less than the cost of 1 current silicon based panel and increase the total amount of power you get anyways.
What makes you think the current US power grid is all that resistent to terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or enemy nation states?
You're not stupid and you read fine. Your problem is you don't understand that he (Musk) is making a broad and simplified general case as an example of how it'd be done, actual implementation details would vary considerably and he knows that. Nitpicking generalizations isn't at all reasonable.
I like nuclear and I really would wish someone would get LFTR's working but realistically there is no reason to expect its going to happen and solar keeps improving enough in cost + efficiency to make the whole issue fairly moot.
I don't think there is a major power source that isn't subsidized by the US tax payer to some degree right now in the US. Even the privately owned profitable ones get subsidized by the US right now.
Big Oil has little to no say in what the big infrastructure class power grid players do and the car companies aren't going to let themselves go belly up to protect Big Oil's profit margins.
Last I checked the first proof of PVs was in the 1950’s and those were super inefficient
The guys doing the natural gas stuff and Big Oil are 2 different groups, you can't conflate them like that. And cars + energy.....that is the lion's share of their (Big Oil's) possible income though. Or do you believe that stuff like Vaseline or ball bearing lube make up the majority of petroleum sale revenues?
Sure Big Oil practically owns a decent chunk of Congress and various state legislatures but that doesn't mean they're invincible. Short of electric vehicles and/or PVC getting band the writing is on the wall here and Big Oil simply doesn't have the pull to make a ban happen.
There is tons of "useless" land that doesn't have any sort of endangered animal living there in desert areas of the US and 100sq mi is nothing compared to how much "useless" land there is in the US.
Oh jeez you don't know what you're talking about. They wouldn't buy them all at once, that is a Big Business 101 no-no. They'd set up a contract buy amongst a group of PVC solar panel manufacturers over a period of time for a set price and gradually have the whole site brought up to full capacity. This sort of thing already happens now to avoid the issues you're talking about BTW.
LOL no. Coal plant sites are shit show to put anything around. Even garbage dumps. They tend to be in areas that are by valuable rail road lines (precludes land development most times and limits in greatly even when you can do any development since the railroad frequently has final say over sites it already owns or owns land around), have huge toxic waste issues (fly ash + toxic metal seepages into ground water), and a GW solar plant would be damn land intensive to install too on top of all that so land costs would probably sink the deal.
Nah this is BS, the contiguous part isn't even a requirement. A solar plant doesn't need contiguous land at all. If you're in the oil n' gas biz it might seem so to you, but you guys are drilling all over hell and gone to find nat. gas or oil or shale. That won't be necessary for even a gigantic solar energy field like Musk is talking about and there are already broad exemptions and plans in place for solar use that won't apply to you or what you do.
He probably got his units of measure mixed up but either way its not a issue. CA alone has already set aside nearly enough land for solar use to power the entire US and they're going to set aside even more over the next couple of decades at least.
Well, yeah, but he can't lobby for a trillion tax dollars to buy his batteries with that kind of attitude.
He doesn't have to, his battery plant has already been paid for and built. And he doesn't even need to build another one either. Any sort of large nation-scale infrastructure grade battery grid would be built over a period of years and scaled up gradually as other currently existing power plants would be shut down as needed.
Well actually you can read very well what you want to read. You wanted to read that solar is stupid. And that is exactly what you read into it.His calculations base it around the availability of sun. Hence why he picked a southern desert area of the USA which has more stable areas of sunlight and less cloudy days.
But I could be wrong. Idiots like me apparently don't know how to read
Or 3)sell the batteries from the plant you've already got built for handsome profits. That works too right?
He is. But he can be a corporate welfare whore and still be right about this.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-megawatts-of-power-does-America-need-per-day said: