Let’s take a look at Elon Musk’s plan to power the U.S. entirely with solar

By Heather Hamilton, contributing writer

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is in the news again after releasing details about his company’s new solar roof pane division at the National Governors Association meeting that took place July 13−16 in Providence, Rhode Island. During a keynote speech, Musk revealed that, by his calculations, the entire United States could be powered by 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels — “a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah.”

“The batteries you need to store the energy so you have 24/7 power is 1 mile by 1 mile,” he said. “One square-mile. It’s a little square on the U.S. map, and then there’s a little pixel inside there, and that’s the size of the battery park that you need to support that. Real tiny.”

Musk is stuck on solar because, as he says, we’ve been relying on the sun for as long as there have been humans. “The Earth is almost entirely solar-powered today, in the sense that the sun is the only thing that keeps us from being at the temperature of cosmic background radiation, which is 3 degrees above absolute zero. If it wasn’t for the sun, we’d be a frozen, dark ice ball. The amount of energy that reaches us from the sun is tremendous. It’s the 99 percent-plus of all energy that Earth has.”

According to Inverse, only 10% of the energy in the United States is renewable, which means that Musk has a lot of ground to cover. In his speech, he identified actionable steps to increase the amount of solar power available. 

Futurism reports that a switch to renewable energy sources would eliminate around 1,821 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions currently generated by electric power, accounting for 35% of CO₂ energy emissions throughout the United States.

Musk believes that the future of solar in America is in the combination of rooftop and utility-scale panels. Tesla has confirmed that they are building a large solar battery to help power South Australia, where power is hard to come by. Chances are, Tesla’s Powerpack would be the utility-scale produce used. 

Musk also calls for the use of alternative power sources while the United States transitions to solar energy. “We’ll need to be a combination of utility-scale solar and rooftop solar, combined with wind, geothermal, hydro, probably some nuclear for a while, in order to transition to a sustainable situation,” he said. 

People don’t like large power lines that reduce infrastructure, Musk acknowledged in his address. Instead, he suggests reliance on rooftop solar and utility solar. 

Governor Dennis Daugaard from South Dakota asked Musk why he thinks electric cars have a future with gas prices on the decline. While Musk believes that all transport except rockets will go fully electric, he says that the big challenge for electric cars is the fact that gasoline-powered vehicles impact everything except the price of gas. 

“There’s an unpriced externality in the cost of fossil fuels,” said Musk. “The unpriced externality is the probability-weighted harm of changing the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. Since it is not captured in the price of gasoline, it does not drive the right behavior. It’d be like if tossing out garbage was just free, and there was no penalty, and you could do it as much as you want. The streets would be full of garbage. We’ve regulated a lot of other things, like sulfur emissions and nitrous oxide emissions; it’s done a lot of good on that front.”

He believes that Tesla vehicles will run off of solar power captured by panels that will recharge the battery.

Despite Musk’s heavy push for solar energy, he remains sympathetic toward the interest of big oil companies whose original founders had no idea how villainous that might someday become. “They worked really hard to create those companies. They feel like they are being attacked on moral grounds. And it is true that we cannot instantaneously change to a sustainable solution.”

Where Musk takes issue is in big oil’s fight to slow down positive change. 

Sources: National Governors Association, Inverse, Futurism, 
Image Source: Wikimedia