I suggest you provide actual evidence for your assertion. You will not be able to, because it is false. The land area in the US is enormous and land cost is only a small fraction of the cost of a PV field. And, of course, grids can be extended as needed.
Again with the hand-waving. "Land is big!" is no kind of argument or evidence. It all comes down to cost and practicality. Energy is not some game, its business.
And with dropping panel cost, land is the last remaining hard nut in the equation. Not a small fraction, a large one, and becoming larger.
As for understanding math, the earth is not getting any bigger. That limit cannot be beat, no matter how breathless the rhetoric.
Now, to find that level unobstructed ground-level stable dry cheap tracts near grids, with access for maintenance. Near where folks need the electricity. And the land isn't ecologically significant. And remember, storage or it's not helping for shit.
There are so many obstacles left! So many reasons it will slow down once the enthusiasm and price supports have dried up. Like everything else we've ever done.
I would have thought the US had several people capable of purchasing an area only a third of an Australian cattle station to corner the future market for solar energy production and build out HVDC delivery lines .. but I forgot it's been all downhill since the space program.
The money is same scale as oil & gas investments so it's not exactly something that isn't being done already - the layout can one big area, many smaller areas, the panels can be raised in the air to allow for crops | animals underneath, etc.
Roadsides would be good, poor quality agricultural land, lake beds that are drying up in the midwest and circa Utah, etc.
But yeah, you're right - too hard for the USofA that used to be great. /<sad>
Meanwhile, we're doing that here already - scaling up to power billion tonne per annum mining operations to deliver resource to the rest of the world .. where do you think China gets it's iron, lithium, mineral sands, etc. from?
Isn't that a curious thing? The most successful businessmen on the planet, and they don't jump into large-scale solar like the pundits think they should?
Maybe that says something about the business model, hm? About how easy or how useful or how successful such an attempt would be.
Armchair energy experts can say anything, claim anything. But follow the money, that tells you what can work and what can't.
Not saying it will never work. But for now, largescale solar is fraught with landmines. But I said that already and been ignored because it's easier to make wild claims than address hard realities.
When CO2 isn't being taxed, of course they don't jump directly into solar. It's like when emissions from a coal plant aren't penalized, they don't install scrubbers or filters. Never mind that the Clean Air Act caused reductions in emissions that were worth 40x the cost of the controls.
What you are just talking about there is that negative externalities are not controlled by market forces, but have to be regulated.
You are engaging in a stereotypical crank behavior here. Make a ludicrous claim without evidence, then demand detailed argument when someone calls you on it.
No, it is YOUR responsibility to argue your initial claim. Only when you have given that detailed argument can you require a detailed argument in rebuttal.
I remind you of Hitchen's Razor: "what is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
