"If we took one tenth of the state of New Mexico and converted it to algae production, we could meet all of the energy demands for the entire United States" : reddit.com
chop51 wrote: Good idea. Here’s my quick “back of the envelope”: 10% of NM is ~7.5 mil. acres. times 43560 ft.^2/acre = ~32.5 x 10^9 I’ll low ball the cost per ft.^2 to build these hi tech greenhouses and say $100/per. Probably considerably more, but at this scale it should be under 1,000/per, so at least we’ll get an idea of what order of magnitude we’re looking at. So that’s another 2 zeros tacked on and we get ~3.25 trillion minimum.
Posted August 18, 2008 at 1:34pm
