Activists who embrace nuclear power

> Storing hydrogen is a nightmare

So is storing enriched uranium. Again this is not a point in favor of nuclear.

> Are there fully-functional farms that can operate on 1,400 covered acres?

"Benefit from partial shade" means exactly that. Any 2800-acre farm that welcomes 50% shade, or any four such 700-acre farms, can. But there has thus far been no demand for the technique, because there is in fact no shortage yet of land for 100% coverage. I have personally seen a large number of fully shaded parking lots; I daresay you have, too.

Solar farms do not need 1400 connected acres. Fourteen 100-acre solar farms are more useful, producing a peak 71 MW each. In my immediate area, just recently, a decommissioned 20-acre landfill ("It’s not exactly a tourist area") was turned into a solar farm, producing useful power the very same year as it began construction. https://highlandscurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Sunl...>

Canals in India are being roofed over with solar panels, reducing evaporation loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Solar_Power_Project> Panels are being floated on hydroelectric dam reservoirs, all over the world, for the same benefit, with easy access to the power grid. Los Angeles could float 175 acres of panels over its municipal reservoir, replacing the black plastic balls it floats today to absorb sunlight that would produce bromates. https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-s-really-going-on-w...>

Railroad rights-of-way are similarly available.

A large fraction of carbon-neutral power comes from wind turbines, which also have encountered no difficulty locating space to operate, already often shared with existing farms and ranches.

Air compression is familiar tech.

So, the only remaining question is which of the others will turn out to be cheaper than air. Hydrogen is essential feedstock in many industries, where storage and handling have long since been worked out, so synergy may push H2 over the line, particularly once it becomes the dominant aviation fuel. There is of course no difficulty with storing or using ammonia, and similar synergies apply. Modern catalytic methods are much more efficient than traditional Haber-Bosch, Sabatier, or electrolysis processes, so costs are plummeting, and the ultimate winner, if there is only one, is unpredictable. In other words, they are all viable, and getting better.

In all cases the costs are still in free fall, so nukes, as already mature tech, fall progressively farther behind.

No, he is correct, its the wave that propagates at a fraction of the speed of light (depending on the conductor). The electrons themselves don't move very fast.

"An electron travels at a speed of about 1 cm/sec. " (in copper) per: https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2916283&seq...

This should be taught in a basic AP physics class in HS (where i initially heard it). I vaguely remember doing some of these calculations in my physics for engineers class as a first year engineering student too.

Long distance power transmission is actually quite efficient, particularly using modern high voltage DC. We totally understand how to move power across continents, and in fact are doing that right this moment globally. The technology is solid enough people are looking seriously at intercontinental power shifting now too.

Cost of storage has been falling dramatically. Lazard has slide decks that summarize the economics as levelized costs. I'd suggest browsing through them, as you've gotten the wrong impression of the real economics. We're crossing the threshold where renewables + storage is economically viable. That's not to say it'll be trivial to scale up the industry, but it's not the economic impossibility you're assuming.

Note that there's a very intense and effective PR campaign around this stuff intended to convince you that the economics are impossible.

The easiest way is to distribute that Thailand-sized area of solar panels around the globe, close to the point of use. This won't help Germany, which will still need either 2000-km-long transmission lines from Extremoduro or Algeria or something, or a lot more 10%-capacity-factor solar panels than they already have, but for electrical power in most of the world, photovoltaic power tends to decrease transmission losses (which are already included in the world marketed energy consumption numbers) rather than increase them. That's because thermal electric power plants tend to be in the 100MW–10GW range where they're most cost-efficient, while PV generation can be economically scaled down to 0.3 kilowatt at present.

Indeed, if the prices of modules and power electronics keep dropping as they have been, there's a point where it becomes uneconomic for most energy users to pay for offsite generation, transmission, distribution, and billing; around 02013 there was a lot of talk about the risk of a "utility death spiral" as more and more grid users deserted the grid for their own private PV farms, leaving the remaining grid users (steel mills, diamond foundries, Bitcoin mines, and the like) to pay higher and higher prices to maintain the stranded infrastructure. So far this has not materialized and probably will not.

However, of those 18 terawatts, about a third are transport fuels, mostly gasoline for cars and diesel for land shipping, but also passenger trains, bunker fuel for cargo ships, and jet fuel for airliners and air shipping. Although ships can plausibly tow their own PV rafts, the others will probably be the last strongholds of fossil fuels due to the low efficiencies of electrolysis (typically around 60%) and the Fischer–Tropsch process (typically 50%), which adds up to "transmission losses" of around 70%, relative to how they're measured in the IEA's report today. And if you're doing this to power your Antarctic research base's electrical needs, you lose another 60% (total losses: 88%) to Carnot.

The good news there, though, is that the electrical part of the equation gets a "Carnot boost": a kilojoule of coal or gas burned to generate electricity only yields 400 J of electrical energy. So we only need 400 W of PV generation to replace each kilowatt of coal mining for electricity!

Okay, I've answered three of your questions. Now it's your turn. How much are current transmission losses typically, and in maximal and minimal cases? How are they affected by transmission-line distance, and how much does the step-up and step-down equipment cost for different voltages? How does HVDC help? Are there better alternatives to water electrolysis followed by Fischer–Tropsch? How does the global distribution of current human energy use relate to the distribution of solar resource?