How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.
Total US energy generation 2021: 4 trillion kwh
Average power generation: 457Gw
Cost of Topaz solar farm: $2.5bn Potential output: 550 Mw Cost per Mw $4.5m
Spend a trillion on similar capacity, you get 220Gw potential output.
But that's assuming you get 550Mw average. In fact, it produces about 1282Gwh output a year, so average is more like 145Mw.
So at a rough estimate, you need more like 10 trillion to meet US electricity demand. And that assumes you have unlimited battery storage for free.
And of course electricity is a small minority of total energy use.
Incidentally, I think it's amazing you get to about 10% of total electricity needs with only $1tr, i.e. around 4% of US national output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
```python trillion_dollars = 1e12
mw = 550
cost_farm = 2.5e9
cost_dollar_per_mw = cost_farm/mw
num_mw = trillion_dollars/cost_dollar_per_mw
num_gw = num_mw/1000
num_gw
kwh = 4e12
mw = kw/1000
gw = mw/1000
gw ```
That's quite high. Here in Germany they assume 530-800€ per kW_peak for a utility-scale ground-mounted system (2021) [0]. You can add additional CAPEX for inflation and expansion of the grid, but <$1500 per kW_peak (aka $1.5m per MW) should be quite possible. Especially if you include scaling effects.
If you add batteries for night-time balancing, LCOE roughly doubles for now.
Economically, no other energy source will beat non-winter day-time PV in the foreseeable future. Imo, as long as other plants are running during those times, investing in PV is a no-brainer.
[0] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...
No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
Solar + reverse hydropower, solar + synthetic fuel manufacture, solar + appropriate sized batteries, solar cranes-with-weights, etc.
Solar is so cheap that all those are plausible. Fusion is still far from ready.
Solar panels are cheap and the market appears to be fine with unreliable power[0] if it's cheap enough.
[0] Unreliable, but predictable that is. You can estimate with decent confidence what the weather will be like tomorrow and you can definitely tell what it's going to be a few hours from now, so energy auctions a day ahead are feasible.
HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
That's how cheap the combination of solar and HVDC is.
We should be installing more solar & wind, but that alone is not a solution to our problems.