[ExI] Dark Matter

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Subject: Re: [ExI] Dark Matter

 

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 3:56 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

Highway 50 had enormous potential as a showcase location for ground based
solar.  It's about 600 km of paved two-lane with a good solid base under it
and very little rain, little cloud cover ever out there in that big old
desert.

 

>.Not a bad idea. As long as you can fund it with kickstarter instead of gov
dollars... LOL

 

This is an idea which scales well.

 

>.There is a lot of sun there... that's for sure. Of note is that Nevada was
the first state to legalize autonomous vehicles. Go figure. -Kelly

 

 

OK hold on, I think I figured out the problem.  It felt one order of
magnitude off and it is.  I worked this problem about 20 years ago and was
getting numbers more like 10 km either side of the road.  This time I forgot
to account for the fact that those cheapy PVs the Chinese are grinding out
below cost are only about 10% efficient.  I did the calcs on this back when
PVs were about an order of magnitude more expensive than they are now, and
oil was a quarter what it is now.

 

So to generate the amount of power we make with natural gas and coal
combined requires about 10 km either side of the road along a nearly
abandoned stretch of pavement in Nevada.  Get on Google Maps, go to street
view, look around.   There is pleeeenty of room for something like that.
Next step is to price out 16 thousand square kilometers of PV panels, or 16
billion square meters.  Any gurus among us?

 

spike

 

 

 

 

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