Quote from maxpi:
uhh, yeah, I recalculated that, approx 60 miles on a side square would do it... 3600 square miles of stirling engines and some million volt lines piping it out... and we don't know if they really tried to use every square foot of their 4500 acre site... The entire Mojave Desert is 25,000 square miles so it's about 15% of the Mojave, the entire Sonoran Desert is 120,000 square miles so it takes 3% of the Sonoran Desert... it would be a big project, think Panama Canal.. but it should be done in the very hottest part of the Sonoran Desert, nothing at all nearly lives there so it would have low impact on the environment and the hotter the area the more energy you get.. you could throw in electric cars and be oil independent by making it larger... California is on track, or was at one point, to be 20% green powered in a couple of years. Wind can't do that, largely it depends on solar projects in the Mojave Desert...
If houses could all be fitted with solar panels we could forget about the infrastructure too but for the average homeowner the expense makes it not enticing to do that currently I guess...
Europe is going into the North African Desert with Stirling Engines to produce green electricity...
