Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to go 100% renewables

Re:Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to g... by Retric on Thursday March 21, 2019 @09:25AM (#19452005)

Nuclear takes a lot of space for security etc. In terms of power production vs lost land area wind is orders of magnitude butter if you have farming. And solar can be placed on other structures making it’s land cost approach zero.

You can also send power under water quite a ways cheaply. So, it’s hard to find a location which needs extreme power production density.

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Re:Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to g... by cal5k on Thursday March 21, 2019 @10:16AM (#19452574)

Nonsense: "Specifically, this report finds that coal, natural gas, and nuclear power all feature the smallest physical footprint of about 12 acres per megawatt produced. Solar and wind are much more land intensive technologies using 43.5 and 70.6 acres per megawatt, respectively."

https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf

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Re:Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to g... by Retric on Thursday March 21, 2019 @03:25PM (#19456307)

Multi megawatt wind turbines take up about around 1/4 of an acre. The rest of the land around them can be used for agriculture. https://www.awea.org/wind-101/benefits-of-wind/wind-in-my-co.... That’s several times more space efficient than nuclear as long as you also need farms which most countries do.

As to solar, clearly you have seen them on roofs which have no other real use.

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