Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.

Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.

As the Technology Connections dude highlighted, yearly, there are about 50 000 square miles used for ethanol fuel cultivation. We do much bigger and less efficient things for fuel. Distributing this all over the country seems much less pipe dreamy than you assert.

Distributed production is super doable. Of course you won't just put a big square somewhere.

Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.

Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.

The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.

> This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined

That isn't a lot. New Mexico alone can fit about 100 Rhode Islands. And NM isn't even the largest thinly-populated sunny state in the union.

Or alternatively, a hundred 10 mile by 10 mile installations. Or on average 2 such installations per state. Hardly seems anywhere near comparable to a Dyson sphere

I mean thats a big number, but if you think about the amount of lakes needed to run hydro, its not actually that much of a number.

I'm not saying musk is a clever man for pointing this out. Even greenpeace said stuff like this in the early 2000s.

the point is, it sounds bigger than it is. For oil storage, the US has something like 36 square miles of storage (converting from cubic to square isnt accurate)

10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.

What is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.