That seems like not much. A household using 1kW (slightly below average) would need more than 100m² of solar panels, which seems like a lot. I'm open to being convinced that solar pv has gotten so cheap that it's worth using on a large scale even in Canada, but I'm not sure if those numbers are going to add up. I'd expect wind power to be a better bet.

[–] AGM@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago (7 children)

100m² seems substantially higher than what I've looked at before, but even using that estimate you could still power 40 homes with a single acre of solar panels. So, that would be something like 12K acres of solar panels to cover all of Manitoba's homes. It's not like that many people live in Manitoba, and there is a lot of land. How many acres of outdoor parking lots are there in Manitoba? Certainly seems like a meaningful contribution could be pretty easily made even using that high estimate for area required to power a home.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There's something magical about solar power which makes people think "it's only 12 thousand acres of solar panels, sounds easy!" You could probably fit them all in an area the size of Manitoba's second-largest city, no problem. Let's go ahead and start building a city-sized grid of access roads out in the woods to be completely levelled and filled with high-tech electronics, batteries, inverters, transmission lines, switching stations, and more solar panels than currently exist in Canada — how hard can it be?

I dunno, it's not impossible. It's just... there might be better ways to solve the problem.

[–] AGM@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Is there something magical about lemmy that makes you think I'm actually suggesting MB install 12K acres of solar panels?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 5 days ago

No, and I didn't really mean to pick on you specifically — it just seems that way in general.

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