  A hundred manufacturers and technology-makers will field
products      Marc Nigliazzo     Center director     Comments  
 Threshold   By relztes on 7/1/2013 6:57:15 PM , Rating: 2 A
handful of homes = 20,000? To be fair, I do think they've
overestimated a bit. The average household electricity
consumption in Texas is about 1130 kWh/month (or 1550 W).
Assuming a capacity factor of 22% (my guess for central Texas),
I get 7000 homes total, minus whatever the university would
consume.  But regardless, using 800 acres to power 7,000 homes
is not a waste of land mass. Do you have any idea how much land
it takes to raise livestock or to grow corn for ethanol? If you
used that land for corn, for example, assuming 400 gallons per
acre as a typical yield, that land could produce about 320,000
gallons of ethanol per year. So those 7000 households have a
choice. A year's worth of electricity or 45 gallons of ethanol.
Another way of looking at it is that the total investment is
about $750,000 per acre. What fraction o