this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.
You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.
It'd be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.
Edit: And if you aren't storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn't reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.
Nuclear power run by a publicly traded company worries me.
Because there will be shareholder value vs. safety trades.
Probably shouldn't be run by them i agree, but they could fund it and go into some agreement to purchase its power.
So don't build it. It needs too much power.
Maybe Trump and Denmark can cover the ice in Greenland with solar cells. That's about 434,000,000 acres
At that scale you aren't using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.
At this scale everything is bonkers. The hoover damn is 2GW.
That severely limits where you can place it, probably more than solar. Now you need all that extra water, and height differential that can be at that scale.