"People will downvote a throwaway account much more aggressively than a non-throwaway. Liberating, but a little disappointing."
You're meant to use it briefly and then, you know, throw it away. The clue is in the name! You've had your account for 1077 days, that's hardly temporary. All your account is is anonymous, not temporary.
And these days you can deploy utility solar for $1.5 a watt.
For 2e12 USD you'd get 1.5e12 watts. That's 1500GW solar generation capacity.
Talk about a missed opportunity.
Wikipedia says the US uses about 5e9 MWh electricity per year.
How close is 1500GW solar generation from 5e9 MWh?
Anyone know? (realizing that we'd need batteries too at some point)
Almost six orders of magnitude too low.
1GW nameplate capacity is about 100MW actual generation, so 1500GW[nameplate] x 8600h = 13GWh = 13000 MWh, comparable to 5e3MWh in round numbers. (This is such a t terrible result, I'm inclined to think you got your numbers wrong.)
googling a bit shows that solar capacity factor is between 13 & 30% Say 18% for a variety of geographies.
1333 GW x 8760 hours * 18% = 2,100,000 GWh
2.1 e6 GWh = 2.1e9 MWh
5e9 MWh is what the US uses now.
Solar is still maybe 1.5 or 2x more expensive than wind. By combining wind and solar, with 2 trillion investment, you'd get most of the way towards a major greening of the grid. (of course batteries, etc will make it more expensive & EVs may double or more electric demand)
So instead of that war & it's bloodshed, we could have gone a very long way towards solving the energy problems & uncertainty facing the US for decades and maybe even establish a system that could last us into perpetuity.
Thanks for reading.