Is this really true? Elon Musk believes a solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles could power the entire USA?

Photo above - our solar powered future, as rendered in Minecraft. Elon Musk's dream of a 10,000 square mile solar farm probably dwarfs this . . .

A solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles powers the entire nation. That’s what Elon Musk said. (see link below). To put this in perspective though, Musk has made a lot of eye-popping claims over the years: He’s going to Mars. He will find $1 trillion in government waste while heading up DOGE. That Tesla cars are “full self-driving” (the Department of Transportation is still suing him over that one. A Tesla can have difficulty navigating its way out of a crowded parking lot.)

But still, the premise of a silicon/cadmium/copper quilt 100 miles by100 miles which fixes everything is alluring no? (Set aside your concerns about copper thefts for now). A giant solar farm is especially attractive if you own a solar panel company, like Musk’s Solar City. The quilt might become less attractive when you realize that 95% of solar panels in America are manufactured in the People’s Republic of China. A nation which refuses to release its 100,000 Uighur minorities from “re-education camps,” and is constantly menacing Taiwan with aircraft and gunboats.

100 miles by 100 miles is larger than it seems. That’s actually 10,000 square miles. Okay, take a deep breath. The entire USA is a whopping 3.X million square miles. But most of this owned by the federal government. So if Musk gets his wish either the government could be impoverished or private landowners could become billionaires, or possibly both at the same time. That’s how government land acquisition works. It’s why the gamblers' express bullet train from California to Vegas is too expensive to complete - $100 million per mile.

10,000 square miles is bigger than Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Miami, Atlanta, and Frostbite Falls, Minnesota combined. I’m sure the 10,000 miles would be carved out of some desert or prairie, and not anywhere close to where we live. But remote locations will trigger the need for more power lines. America has 600,000 miles high voltage lines. If you want to reach places like Hawaii and Alaska, the story probably gets worse.

Personally, I’m okay with paving over 10,000 miles of useless desert, if this would actually fix anything. But it probably won’t. America already uses 4 trillion KwH of electricity annually. There are dozens of new data centers planned. One announced this week will use more electricity than the entire state of Utah. And then there’s the government’s efforts to outlaw gasoline cars, diesel trucks, gas furnaces and kitchen appliances . . . still a work in progress.

If you doubt any of this is true, just remember that China uses 10 trillion KwH of electricity a year – more than double the USA. Because China has 10 times as many electric vehicles.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Elon Musk Says It Would Only Take 100 Miles By 100 Miles Of Solar Panels To Power The Entire U.S. —The Sun Is 'Really Reliable. It Comes Up Every Day'

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/elon-musk-says-only-100-140103053.html