Sure. There’s enough sunlight to run the whole country, so it’s physically possible, but it’s not at the moment technologically or economically practical, and may not be our best option in the near future. Until this wave of battery installations, though, I thought even California had saturated its solar potential. In the next post I’ll write in more detail about what I think is now possible, but briefly, it’s now feasible for all western US peak load (the extra power needed while people are awake) to be provided by solar and batteries. Whether we’ll also use solar for base load, and whether we’ll use it in cloudy areas, is a more difficult question that requires extrapolating prices, and I’ll try to address that in the third post.
Sure. There’s enough sunlight to run the whole country, so it’s physically possible, but it’s not at the moment technologically or economically practical, and may not be our best option in the near future. Until this wave of battery installations, though, I thought even California had saturated its solar potential. In the next post I’ll write in more detail about what I think is now possible, but briefly, it’s now feasible for all western US peak load (the extra power needed while people are awake) to be provided by solar and batteries. Whether we’ll also use solar for base load, and whether we’ll use it in cloudy areas, is a more difficult question that requires extrapolating prices, and I’ll try to address that in the third post.