Originally Posted by Irishguy
Originally Posted by Skinny
Originally Posted by Irishguy
A typical solar farm generates between 0.15 and 0.2 megawatts of electricity per acre. This can vary based on factors like panel efficiency, location, and available sunlight.

So to round that out, that works out to about 100 megawatts per 640 acres which is 1 square mile. So 100 megawatts per square mile.

A typical large coal burning power plant can like Plant Bowen between Rome and Cartersville, Georgia produces 3,450 megawatts.

So it would take 340 square miles to produce as much solar power as a large coal power plant.

That would be most of Etowah County, Alabama completely covered in solar panels.

The solar projects I have mitigated are basically a full section or a half section. so thats 640 acres or 320.
The reason these data centers are going for solar is speed, not for being green and anti-coal or anti-nuclear. A solar farm can be planned and be generating power within a year. They dont generate power like a burner plant does but they get built much faster. Any kind of burner plant (coal, gas, nuclear) takes much longer. Even if the regulations that slow them down were tossed, they still have to be built. A solar farm can be built damn near overnight and they can start generating power as soon as the first panel is set in place.

I'm not anti-solar, just being a realist. Solar and wind have their place, but we have to use all the arrows in the quiver to supply the power the world will need.

I designed air pollution control for power plants. I doubt we will ever see a new coal fired power plant being built, that's just not going to happen, that time has passed, however natural gas fired combined cycle plants are very common and fairly easy and relatively quick to build using a common architecture.

Southern Company has probably built the last large scale nuclear units over at Plant Vogtle. Those were the first new ones in 30 years and will probably be the last.

The future of nuclear will be in small modular reactors used in a distributed power production model.

Spot on. Those small modular reactors are likely the best way forward when it comes to nuclear. There’s a good bit of research going on right now on the small scale reactors and just from a footprint standpoint it seems to make the most sense. There’s a nuke plant not far from me that has one reactor built in the 70’s. They literally made a very large lake out of rural farm land to service that one reactor. I just don’t see a project of that size ever being undertaken again in this part of the country. Not only has the population here boomed, the environmental regulations would make it nearly impossible to get off the ground. Just doesn’t make practical sense now when the technology seems to be trending towards smaller, more efficient ways to generate power.

Fun side note on solar farms. Clemson is doing a bunch of research on engineering crops that can be grown in conjunction with solar farms in order to make more efficient use of the land they take up. Will be interesting to see if they can develop some viable crops that can produce in the same space as the solar arrays. Definitely would be cool to see those spaces produce food and power at the same time.