> but have much greater infrastructure costs than nuclear.
And proponents of solar forget that they have to cover large swaths of land with solar to begin with. Some places don't have the luxury of converting land to solar farms
And proponents of solar forget that they have to cover large swaths of land with solar to begin with. Some places don't have the luxury of converting land to solar farms
Likewise, PV cladding on electric cars, even though this is absolutely not the optimal place for PV, can generate 50-80% of the mean demand for that vehicle in most places.
But PV scales up and down, so you can also use it as a roofing material in a car park (one of the reasons cladding cars themselves in PV isn't the best idea), or on otherwise worthless land like the gap between the eastbound and westbound I-80 [0], or on top of reservoirs and rivers where we want to reduce evaporation [1].
Given where the sunlight mostly falls and where people mostly live, the biggest discrepancies are the UK (mostly as bad as the coastal mountains on the strip of Canada between Washington state and Alaska), and China (the people mostly live in the east which is relatively cloudy, the desert where they put some (but not all) of their PV is in the west).
For the small settlements that can't use PV and which it would be uneconomical to connect to a grid, there's wind and geothermal, and the rest may be so few as to not actually matter for environmental purposes if they do keep using diesel or methane. But probably not nuclear, because you can get a lot of transmission cable for the price of a reactor.
[0] I'm not sure how big that gap is, but a few random samples suggest 15 meters width, which means 20% efficient PV there has a nameplate capacity of 14 GW, and even assuming just 10% duty factor that's still more than a nuclear power plant, but the capacity factor is mostly going to be 18% in the area the I-80 goes through.
The entire US interstate network, assuming 15 m direction separation and 20% efficiency, has room for 235 GW nameplate, adjust accordingly for capacity factor.
There's much more length of railway line in the US, though I have no idea what the average width is over its length, and I don't understand the engineering constraints well enough to know how close PV could be placed to the rails (between the sleepers?)
[1] Lake Mead by itself would be enough for 128 GW nameplate, looking at the solar potential in that area it probably has a capacity factor of 22%.