Comment by ianterrell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianterrell | Hacker News Reader

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The Census says there are 110,692,000 occupied homes in the US, so 150k is 0.136% of that.[1] That means that there would need to be 738 of them to meet demand.

Now, the EIA says there are about 5700 power plants currently operating in the US [2]. Continuing with the back of the envelope math, that's almost 8 times as many as would be necessary if they all produced as much as this one. Pick whatever factor you want for "non-home" energy, but we're dealing with the right order of magnitude.

Combine that with the clean energy aspect of it, and I don't see a lot of reason to be cynical.

[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html [2] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=65&t=2

The other aspect you're missing is the probably somewhat larger energy consumption from non-residential properties.

Wikipedia [1] says that the energy consumption of the US is 25,000 TWh per annum. Looking at the top rated comment and picking instead a CF between the two (I used 0.6); we're looking at this tower producing in the region of 1TWh.

So you'd actually need about 25,000 of these towers to provide for the energy requirements of the US. Ouch.

Edit: obviously, this is for the complete replacement of all existing energy use with clean renewable electricity. The gross US electricity production is given [2] as 4344 TWh (2008).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unite...

So at $750 million a pop, that's a little over $550 billion to power US homes. Or, roughly 50% of the annual budget of the military to power all US homes for 80 years!

Clearly back of the envelope numbers, but definitely something to be excited about.

Well, you can't only have these things powering US homes because I can't imagine they work that well at night.

They do actually.

Truth be told, the article doesn't say how well they work at night. I don't think that it'll work just as good, but that doesn't mean it won't work at all.

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