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Comment by mronge | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels).

Is that not feasible?

https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187

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It's not feasible, no. The "reasonable area" is on the order of all the concrete in the world. You have to duplicate civilization but with precision electronic devices instead of stone.[1] Musk is, unfortunately, not thinking outside his prejudices on the subject of energy systems. In all fairness, this is very common. Discourse on energy systems in our culture is closer to religion than engineering.

[1] http://lumma.org/energy/EnergyLCA.html

Not if you live outside the sunbelt. Distribution of electricity is hardly free

US has lots of sunny areas with little people, agriculture or wildlife, but UK doesn't. Many European countries are dense and cloudy.

It can still help.

I'm surprised they don't invest in production just south in North Africa, it would be pretty trivial to lay cables across to Gibraltar. They would of course have to do it with a sense of economic fairness and fairly pay the countries in money and technology / education transfer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

It's quite unstable politically.

Spain might be a better bet.

On the other hand, maybe one could just move people to Spain and avoid this whole electricity transportation mess.

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