[Kellis91789]

Cover the whole state of Nevada to power Las Vegas ? Not quite.

You get basically 10 watts per square foot from a PV, and you can count on 5 hours per day as an average in Nevada. So 5wh per square foot, or 140Mwh per square mile per day. That’s enough for 5,000 homes. If you covered a square 100 miles on a side, you’d have power for 50 million homes. 200 miles on a side and you’d have enough power for all the homes in America. 300 miles on a side and you’d have enough electric power for all homes and businesses in America. And have plenty of Nevada dessert left over.

Cost is the issue — finding space for enough solar panels is not.

[chimera]

There are other issues, non-economic ones (imagine that). Try siting an engineered structure 200 miles on a side, in the middle of the desert, in farmland, anywhere. You're going to have environmentalist wackos crawling out of the woodwork from here to China just foaming at the mouth to oppose such a thing. It's an environmental nightmare.

You've calculated instantaneous power output under optimum conditions. That will drop when the conditions are non-optimum, such as at night. Unless you have some kind of humongous, super-efficient storage system, which will add significantly to costs.

Also, I doubt if such a system will have much in the way of dispatchability. Something spread out over that much territory, even in the desert, is bound to have some measure of variability. And variability is something you don't want if you are sitting in the hot seat of the regional power dispatching center.

[OCCASparky]

Cost is the issue — finding space for enough solar panels is not.

And manufacturing capability. Remember, over 1/3 of the PV solar cells go towards solar-powered calculators.