Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Blood
As of March 2020, America has approximately 1.2 million megawatts of generation capacity. The largest fuel source for this capacity is natural gas (44%), followed by coal (21%). Nuclear, hydro, and wind together account for about one-quarter of capacity. Solar currently constitutes over 3% of all capacity.
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Yeah, definitely, and a few things about America's electrical power generation:
* Our electrical infrastructure desperately needs upgrading, what's cheapest? More on that in a sec
* Consumer micro-generation is now possible, i.e., making their own electrical power to be self-sufficient, and it turns out this is more a lot safer and more secure especially during storms / natural disasters because you don't need so many lines running all over and people can keep power for food, medicine, healthcare, etc. West coast wildfires, east coast hurricanes are examples.
* Current US infrastructure uses "
peaker plants" which sit idle 90% of the time and cost hundreds of millions to build, and more to staff and maintain. And, battery peaker plants are 10x cheaper and way more efficient.
* In fact, Elon Musk's 100 MW
Australian peaker built with solar and wind won a bet and has been powering Southern Australia for 2 years
* Further, even with older solar technology, it would take ~21,000 square miles of solar to power the entire US - which sounds like a lot until you realize that's a corner of AZ, and according the the US BLM Big Oil leases ~40,000 sq miles of land ... and that
doesn't power the entire US and it doesn't include private land for oil, coal lands, refining, etc ... or the ~33,000 sq mi of land for growing corn for ethanol.
In other words, the US could launch an energy revolution economic boom via building new power infrastructure with a highly secure, highly versatile, way cheaper, way cleaner electrical grid. China's gonna, we might as well beat them to it with our own tech!