Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The USA of yesteryear would have done this already and more. Sure other sources are required, but honestly we humans have to advance beyond burning dead things for fuel.
Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
As the Technology Connections dude highlighted, yearly, there are about 50 000 square miles used for ethanol fuel cultivation. We do much bigger and less efficient things for fuel. Distributing this all over the country seems much less pipe dreamy than you assert.
Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.
10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.
I trillion is going to dispersal in the AI black hole in the next couple years (in the US), I wish the same money were invested in the clean energy instead.
What is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.
Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
Or alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere
There are 13,000 square miles of dedicated parking lots in the United States. Covering these gets you a double-whammy of keeping heat out of the ground and generating power.
I mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number.
I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.
the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)
It bothers me that you attribute this to Elon Musk. This has been obvious to everyone for 75 years or more. The lecturer in my freshman thermodynamics class mentioned it, 35 years ago. In 1999, NREL scientists writing in the journal Science under the title "A Realizable Renewable Energy Future" made the specific claim about 10000 square miles.
Thank you. I was not aware of prior references especially that it could be done with 10K square miles, until media reports of Elon's speech at Davos recently.
The De Minimis loophole is highly significant with FOUR Million packages per day (What ???). The clause to address this loophole needs to be stated more accurately - It should be clearly defined to be higher or lower of 30 % of the value of shipment under $800 OR $25 per shipment and not either. If either then the De Minimis loophole will be continue to be used at $25 per shipment.
Source : https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
The De Minimis loophole is highly significant with 4 Million packages per day (What ?). The clause to address this loophole needs to be stated more accurately - It should clearly define it to be higher / lower of 30 % of value of shipment under $800 or $25 per shipment and not either
There is sufficient scholarly published work but the script lacks the equivalent of a Rosetta stone. A prize offered by an Indian state leader is intended to shed light on a Bronze Age civilization — and settle a cultural battle.
> if net manufacturing and battery costs were to fall
That makes it even worse. If costs fall, competitive pressure will force you to lower the price of your new vehicles, which has a knock-on effect of reducing the resale value of each EV you get back from the consumer from leases that are ending.
Imagine a $50,000 vehicle. You write a lease that assumes that it will be worth $25,000 in 3 years. Instead of charging the customer $25,000 for the lease, you only charge them $15,000. When they return the vehicle, you sell it for $25,000 as planned. But the total amount of money you collected is $40,000 - a loss of $10,000. Now, what happens if net manufacturing and battery costs drop in those 3 years? Your new cars are on the lot for $40,000 and when the customer turns in their leased vehicle you can only find a buyer for it at $15,000. You've therefore collected $30,000 for your $50,000 car and have to eat a loss of $20,000.
Cheap leases get sales on the books today, but come with guaranteed losses years down the road (and you hope the market doesn't tank in the meantime). It might work out well in the end, but rarely does.
Forget global warming, I want EVs to help air quality in my area. The silver lining of Covid was we had the cleanest air I have ever seen for a week or two when everyone was holed up in their homes and nobody was driving cars.
And if the EV is heavier than their previous car (generally very likely anywhere other than maybe the US), will increase the biggest single source of microplastics (which also is proving to have significant climate effects) in tire dust.
This guy is cherry picking his stats, example here is the GV70 from Wikipedia:
*1,820–1,985 kg (4,012–4,376 lb) (2.5T)
*1,975–2,010 kg (4,354–4,431 lb) (3.5T)
*1,860–2,010 kg (4,101–4,431 lb) (2.2D)
*2,230–2,310 kg (4,916–5,093 lb) (EV)
He compared it against the heaviest ICE car, which is a fucking diesel. It still weighs 750+lbs more than that. Sorry to say but that is a significant weight difference.
For perspective, the GV70 is almost as heavy as a 4wd crew cab Chevrolet Silverado pickup. The difference between the GV70 EV and the Silverado is less than the difference between the diesel and EV GV70s.
1/2: Great points, thank you for educating me on this and renders my point largely moot, at least when compared to ICEs
3: I'm incredibly skeptical. We've heard this from every industry with enormous negative externalities. Clean coal and all that jazz. Green steel. Recyclable plastics. Non-carcinogenic coatings. Until we actually have tires that produce multiple times less break dust, EVs are still horrific compared to non-bus public transit from an environmental perspective.
Incredible. If all governments are serious about global warming, they would move all public transport buses to this battery (and hook it up to Solar farms directly, when parked in terminals between break shifts). Public transport buses are the ones that would clock 1.5 million kms. (200 km / day x 300 days = 60,000 kms per year, considering 2 month downtime per bus). One can quickly wean off caveman oil.
To me it would make sense for large vehicles like city buses to use some sort of battery swapping system. Each half hour or hour when they get back to the main terminal they swap batteries and carry on.
If planting two billion trees has so many challenges in a sparsely populated country (considering Canada's land area) - how is the One Trillion trees project supported by the likes of Marc Benioff (Salesforce) even possible ? For the record : I'm all for more greenery and forests.
I'm from that generation where they were just getting over trying to make left handing kids right handed. Now that I'm older I find myself doing all kind of weird things...
For example as a kid I had to use left handed scissors or I couldn't cut things, now I use right handed scissors in either hand. I switch my mouse to my right and left hand sometimes without thinking about it. My brain just transparently maps the right click to my left hand index finger. I throw with my right arm and shoot right handed, but when it comes to tool use I seem to be ambidextrous. This said, I can only write with my left hand.
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