Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

The United States could produce all its power by covering 2% of its land with solar panels - for comparison, we use 20% of our land for agriculture, so this would look like Nevada specializing in farming electricity somewhat less intensely than Iowa specializes in farming corn

The remaining limitation is high-density use cases; for example, a passenger jet needs to get a lot of power from a source light enough to fit on the plane. So far batteries can’t do that. The solarists are undaunted: you can use solar power to “mine” carbon from the air and convert it into fossil fuels, then use the fossil fuels on the plane. Sinc... See more