Perhaps someone should tell this dickhead about all of the land the US will lose due to carbon emissions from coal power. Or maybe mention the continuing increase in business insurance due to the same thing. If we are going to point out the adverse effects of solar we should point out the adverse affects of coal.
Also the incredibly long supply lines that go to fossil fuel plants. Solar panels aren't as green as we like to think, but they're rugged as fuck and require 0 infrastructure to produce power. Most of the maintenance is wiping them with a damp sponge¹, and (these ghouls should love this part) zero non-maintenance labor to operate, no moving parts, and they work best during peak demand times, right? If I were powering my Last Redoubt, solar would be up there on my list of options until the sun dies.
I have no idea about the actual number, but saying the power is decreased by 30 GW does make sense, though... Of course it is not energy, but they might not have meant "solar energy" in the sense of a physical quantity. The sentiment is bullshit of course.
ok so technically, a watt is directly convertable to a joule, which is a unit of energy. So he isn't wrong. But he is also wrong because he is using name plate production capacity, rather than the total produced capacity, that or he is simply fucking up the numbers. But lets be honest, homie is NOT doing the math.
in this scenario it wouldn't be speed, though, it would be speed over time. Speed is velocity.
Watts are just joules but arbitrarily defined. Joules are a unit of total energy. A collective amount of work potential. Watts are an in situ measurement of those joules doing work.
If we want to talk about confusing units, W and VA are the units to be talking about.
The US used over 3.6 million gigawatts hours of energy in 2020. If you round down, and assume no increase in the last 4 years, that's over 9800 per day. 30 is a drop in the bucket. We have combined cycle natural gas plants, along with other green options to pick up for dips in production exactly like this.
A better question is how much energy we gain from solar if losing it for a couple hours once a decade or so is such a big deal.
He didn't write GWH, he just said GW. For all we know, assuming this number relates to reality at all, that's just smear across the whole eclipse and no single watt was lost for more than a few minutes.
If we lost "30GW", I'd bet we lost barely one GWH.
I was in the penumbra, and around here I would say the entire event took an hour and a half, from "any of the sun at all is covered" to "none of the sun at all is covered." I'm sure our local solar panels did dip in output, probably to the point of producing no useful power for several minutes as it got noticeably darker.
"ignore the fact that we produce oil from the middle east because our locally produced oil is too clean to be refined into usable products for the US domestic market"
Yes let's not invest in green energy because checks notes once every 20 years we will lose a fraction of a percentage of solar energy for about 4 minutes.
Also not for nothing but wind energy actually picks up during that time and generally for a few days before and after too.
I suspect if you went through his history he has already told us that solar is useless because of night, and that wind is useless because sometimes it's still
