"Lors de leur audition précitée, les représentants du BRGM ont indiqué que pour remplacer un réacteur nucléaire de 1 GW fonctionnant avec un facteur de charge de 75 %, il faudrait recouvrir 5200hectares de panneaux photovoltaïques, soit la moitié de la surface de Paris."
Replacing a 1GW nuclear reactor (a power plan can have 2, 3 or 4) with a capacity factor of 75% will need 5200h of solar panels, half of Paris surface.
This doesn't also solve the transport and storage issues to handle the intermittence.
After that you simply have to do the maths. Knowing that solar panels are loosing efficiency over time and needs to be replaced after 20 years. Nuclear power plants are currently holding after 70 years.
France is 551,695 km2
So 1/10,000th of france would be needed for 1GW
A 1GW reactor produces 9 billion kwh a year
France's entire electric requirement is 450 billion, so needs about 50GW, or 0.5% of France's surface area.
Based on those figures, space isn't a problem.
According to the parent poster, those 52 km² are needed for 1GW. France needs around 50GW, 50 times more power and area, ergo 2500 km².
It's the yellow dots here
France has about 1 million km of roads [1], lets assume at least 2m wide. That's 2,000 sq km.
How many of these roads can you see on this picture
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
Solar produces dramatically less power in the winter, and having season long storage is not practical.
As an example, the largest plant in Arizona produces only 10% in January compared to June.
2) You don't really NEED Season long storage, but Season long thermal storage would do the job
2. Of course you do. Power needs to be 99.95% reliable. We cannot have entire winters without power just because the sun wasn't out enough in one particular June. ..."thermal storage" is incredibly inefficient and entirely theoretical.
But they are only applicable in some cases. Utility-scale seasonal electrical energy storage is orders of magnitude from practicality.
You don't need it, though. Most populated places can easily install enough solar panels to provide their winter energy demands, providing a great surplus of energy during the summer.
https://gasturbineworld.com/first-fire-for-la-porte-carbon-c...
Throwing techs at a problem will not solve the problem.
Utterly false.
There are some possible nuances, though:
1. We do need to be careful about the environmental impact of the manufacturing. Current semiconductor manufacturing is not a major polluter, but semiconductor manufacturing has been a major polluter in the past before emissions controls were imposed, and we're talking about scaling up semiconductor fabrication by about three orders of magnitude.
2. Shading a significant proportion of the Atacama, the Sahara, and the Gobi will surely produce local environmental changes. Perhaps it will give rise to new oases, as shipwrecks sometimes become artificial reefs. But it's hard to predict things like this.
3. It seems very unlikely that energy demand will remain static in the face of such a dramatic expansion of energy supply and consequent lowering of costs, so construction probably will not stop just because current world marketed energy demand is met. In the 2040s we will surely be complaining about the percentage of the Pacific that is covered in nasty solar barges.
Edit: Also, recycling solar panels isn't sraightforward at all because of heavy metals (e.g. Cadmium) being used as dopants.
> Excretion is mainly renal although small amounts of tellurium are exhaled as dimethyl telluride which has a distinctive garlic odour which may persist for many days; Reisert (1884) reported garlic breath odour for 237 days following ingestion of 15 mg tellurium oxide.
In short, you have managed to pack so many errors into under 20 words that it required an entire paragraph to explain most of them. Your epistemology is bad and you should feel bad.