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Dirty_South_Cracka t1_ja1k3as wrote

Reply to comment by charliej102 in How Much Land Would It Require To Get Most Of Our Electricity From Wind & Solar? by BlitzOrion

That's almost 450 miles wide and deep. A single strand of 0000 AWG wire that stretches 450 miles at $10.00 per ft. would cost almost 24 million dollars. I just can't see how that is feasible.

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jherico t1_ja1my1k wrote

24 million would be a rounding error to any significant new power infrastructure. Coal and nuclear plants cost in the billions to build.

The real issue with building any kind of massive solar installation is getting power to where it's needed. For instance, a massive solar plant in Africa is useless to Europe, because there's no effective way of getting the power there, not in the amounts needed.

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ADMIRAL_IMBA t1_ja21hk0 wrote

The political situation is even worse than the efficiency loss. You need constant government and an army to protect such a facility.

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jherico t1_ja22jqh wrote

I think there are political issues but I don't think guarding the site is one of them. The site would need to be remote to avoid conflicting with existing land use, and short of using nukes, how much damage could anyone do to a facility spread out over half a million square kilometers?

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pinkfootthegoose t1_ja3xj7y wrote

no one is actually saying put all the solar panels in one place. It's just an illustration so people can get their minds around it. We know the panels are going to be on roofs and on parking lots and spread around here and there by various utilities.

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klaagmeaan t1_ja1njsx wrote

You don't háve to build it all in one place eh?

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billdietrich1 t1_ja2nm21 wrote

We're going to end up paying trillions to remediate climate change damage. We can afford to deploy renewable energy. It will be more at a neighborhood level than in one huge installation for the whole world. We can deploy solar PV on frameworks above parking lots and roads and flood basins etc, for example.

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pinkfootthegoose t1_ja3x5ol wrote

to put things into prospective think of this. The world makes around 78 million vehicles per year. Think of how much materiel goes into each vehicle. what if I told you that if you parked each vehicle side by side in a huge parking lot it would cover roughly the same area as the needed solar panels? We do it every single year with cars.

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