$500M/day would represent roughly 1000 megawatts of solar farm, per day. Depending on where said farms are located that could power at least 250,000 homes. For the next 25 years. Per day.
Good thing battery costs are dropping at over 10% per year (for lithium ion), and tons of other options exist for grid scale stationary applications, like iron-air, sodium, vanadium flow, gravity, pumped water, compressed air, kinetic…)
A steady demand and generation would eventually drive down the costs (unless there’s a resource scarcity), generating jobs, related industries and r&d.
In addition, it would also drive down power costs and with it make power-intensive production cheaper, which might retrofit into solar generation costs.
And the longer I think of this make-believe magical world where politicians do sensible things that help us, the angrier I get on our shitty reality.
$500M/day would represent roughly 1000 megawatts of solar farm, per day. Depending on where said farms are located that could power at least 250,000 homes. For the next 25 years. Per day.
The batteries to support them unfortunately cost an order of magnitude more and you kinda need to smooth out all that generation.
Would still be a hell of an investment into energy security, not just sustainability.
Good thing battery costs are dropping at over 10% per year (for lithium ion), and tons of other options exist for grid scale stationary applications, like iron-air, sodium, vanadium flow, gravity, pumped water, compressed air, kinetic…)
So instead of 1000 farms, setup 91 farms and 91 battery backups (equal to 910 farms). That still a lot of investment into the future
Or a whole medium-sized AI datacenter!
A steady demand and generation would eventually drive down the costs (unless there’s a resource scarcity), generating jobs, related industries and r&d.
In addition, it would also drive down power costs and with it make power-intensive production cheaper, which might retrofit into solar generation costs.
And the longer I think of this make-believe magical world where politicians do sensible things that help us, the angrier I get on our shitty reality.