Al got it, mostly

The solar energy resource in a 100-mile-square area of Nevada could theoretically supply the United States with all its electricity using even modestly efficient commercial photovoltaic modules, according to the Department of Energy.
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This is Acciona's 400-acre, 64 MW Solar One concentrating solar power project in the desert at Boulder City, Nev., between Las Vegas and Lake Mead. It went online a couple of years ago and is relatively small compared to what's on the drawing boards now. 

Flying into Vegas from the east, watch for it on the left side of the airplane as you prepare to land at McCarran International. You can't miss it. A little farther to the left is Hoover Dam, another renewable energy source. It's capable of over 2,000 MW. So, state-of-the-art concentrated solar (circa 2007) is not quite up to state-of-the-art concentrated hydro (circa 1935). 

Currently, federal development subsidies and an enabling political climate aren't either – although, ironically, the economy and unemployment rates of America in the 1930s are not unlike Nevada's now.

But that's another story.

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Could this be true? If so, it means about 20, 5-by-5-mile patches of desert covered with PVs or mirrors – valued until now only by turtle and lizard lovers, welfare ranchers, fatally fecund wild horses and burros, multinational mining conglomerates, "burning man"-type free spirits and foul-smelling Gabby Hayes impersonators – could power the entire United States.

Gabby Hayes is not the guy on the left.

Al Gore brought it up at a Senate hearing on climate change a while back and was pounded by critics who said he didn't have his facts straight. Botched a bit? Yeah. Gist of it? Yeah, he got it. Big Al just omitted a few practical details, a few inconvenient truths. 

PolitiFact weighs in:

There are all sorts of reasons why building a 10,000-square-mile (a square with 100-mile sides) solar installation would be even more difficult than it sounds.

For one, we would need a place to store the electricity so that it could be doled out in the dark night hours and on cloudy days.

Also, we would need a vast new system of transmission lines.

He didn't mention the logistical problems of mounting arrays on steep mountainsides, plentiful in Nevada, and the aesthetic and environmental downsides of large concentrating solar thermal projects. It doesn't hurt having one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country, Sen. Harry Reid, on your side. But all politics is local, and we still live in a democracy. County- and state-level elected leaders and historical cultural values can derail even the best-laid strategic plans of out-of-state and out-of-country corporations.

Still, a lot of potential clean energy* – that, if developed, could help Nevada with its massive state budget problems and nation-leading unemployment rate – falls unused on dirt and rocks owned by the federal government and administered by the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada and the Southwest and bounces back into space. 

That seemed to be Al's main point.


*When victims of skin cancer think of the sun's energy, the first word that comes to mind is probably not "clean."