Comment

Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate

4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That’s about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.

However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.

source

Sort:hotnew top

sj_zero ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Except that that solar farm doesn't produce energy at night, so you'd need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you're looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you'd need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.

Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required -- for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.

Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It's fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things -- like ethanol fuels.

That's where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don't need to be oversized and don't need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren't available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn't enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they're probably just shouldn't be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.