I decided to find out just how much solar power it would take to power the US. The results were disturbing.
The US uses roughly 3.3 TW a day. The better solar arrays power produce on average 1 GW per sqr/km per day in the US, accounting for cloud cover. So that means that to power the entire nation an area of 3/8ths of contiguous US would need to be a giant solar array. That's essentially everything east of the Mississippi river. (derived from data in Wikipedia)
This means solar power can never be anything more than chump change in US energy policy!
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