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Old 06-01-2019, 02:08 PM   #5926 (permalink)
aerohead
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primary power

Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler View Post
So Right now the USA is using 27,175 TeraWatt hours per year of total primary energy. Your favorite reference (Solution Project) states that if we could electrify everything in the best way possible we would need only half. And you want to supply half of that from Nevada with solar. How much land area to average 7,000 TWh per year. 800 GigaWatts continuous average?
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5,333 of the 500 MW nameplate SolarStar state of the art solar PV farms. Which has crystalline panels on trackers and an automated wash system for a capacity factor of 31% on 5 square miles in a 3,000 foot tropical desert.
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26,666 square miles.
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Nevada = 110,567 square miles. So more like 25% of the land area will need to be covered with panels.
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The current installed price for grid scale pv in the USA is about $3/ Watt.
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$2.4 Trillion. For half of the USA demand if we could spend trillions more to retrofit everything.
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Which makes 3X too much power at noon on a perfect day. And nothing all night every night.
Why don't we start out by limiting the discussion to only US electric power consumption.
The other industrial energy consumption can be handled in a separate discussion.
Renewables can carry the entire load.And they will over time.And we've been given 30-years to get the job done.
At $2.4-trillion,that would be 68-cents per day,per capita,to pay for it,in 2019 dollars.
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