You could power the entire US using less than 1% of farmland for solar. I can’t see this being a huge issue?
Q: How do you transport that across "the entire contient of North America"?
It really is a solved problem.
Perhaps we should keep burning coal then.
<chuckle>
"Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/07/ai-data-c...
"Energy experts and analysts have warned for years now that America’s power grid will not be able to accommodate the explosive growth in electricity demand it faces without a huge increase in generation capacity."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/11/green-ener...
"The U.S. electric grid is often described as a vast, synchronized machine — a network of wires carrying electricity from power plants across the country into our homes [...] in reality, there is no single U.S. grid. There are three — one in the West, one in the East and one in Texas — that only connect at a few points and share little power between them. Those grids are further divided into a patchwork of operators with competing interests. That makes it hard to build the long-distance power lines needed to transport wind and solar nationwide."
"Many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/12/climate/us-el...
Step 1: Stop worrying about coming up with an idea for a startup...
Step 2: Build "thousands of miles of transmission lines"
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
1) We already build thousands of transmission line miles per year, so describing this as unreasonable is just out of touch
2) the ??? step is just regular transmission utility business. There’s no ambiguity here.
Leaks are not an eco disaster...
Mexico has their own deserts to power their country with solar and Canada is already well ahead on renewables through hydropower.
Don't worry about premature optimization.
2) Making it near consumers makes little difference to overall land-use. Yes, you can make more solar power from the same area in desert than in more temperate climates, but you're still talking a very small amount of land.