re: Elon Musk: Tesla can build power grid for Puerto Rico

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Didn't he get a huge contact for something similar in Australia? Wind and solar seem like a good option for an island.

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Like a lot of guys here have noted, Musk is a con man, who specializes in feel good projects to suck off the government teat.

That said, to a not inconsiderable extent, conservative folks pooh pooh non-fossil energy sources too much.

Look, I'm an engineer. Without running on at the mouth too long, wind and any kind of tidal/ocean base energy extraction (thinking of things like OTEC) is a situational toy. Wind is actually useful in the Great Plains states or Texas. But not in most of America.

Solar however is a game changer. The solar cells are efficient enough and cheap enough now. And the juice is there, I mean it is really there. And it is availabale everywhere humans might actually want to live (though the "Long Nights" in extreme northern latitudes make it less so in some areas).

And I can tell you, we are good enough now with electricity transmission that we really could power lights in Miami with energy generated by windmills in North Dakota. Whether that is as cheap as a coal plant in Florida is another thing. But we could do it well enough that society wouldn't miss a beat or notice the extra expense - Except...

We suck at energy storage. Really suck at it. That problem ever gets resolved in a workable manner, and all kinds of changes will happen, almost overnight.

And things like wind energy fluctuate so much, and are intermittent like solar that they really aren't as useful as you would hope till we actually do get large scale grid storage, or cheap workable batteries for individual households that can take a few thousand charging cycles and won't break the bank to replace or install in the first place.