My $1.7 quadrillion plan to replace oil with solar power!

Today I spent a few hours going over some of the comments and feedback on my recent posts. Lots of people have been saying that I am completely wrong about solar and it got me thinking: what would a plan to replace oil with solar really look like? Good news: I spent a few hours on a Saturday afternoon to come up with a plan that can work.

We currently #consume about 100 million barrels of #oil per day. Each barrel of oil contains about 1.7 #megawatt hours (MWh) of energy, so the oil we consume every day contains about 170 #terawatt hours.

Average annual #solar #radiation on #earth at #sea level (also called #insolation) is about 1,000 #kilowatt hours (kWh) per square meter (m2). It varies a lot, but from the reading I've done so far, that looks like a reasonable global average value. A standard 20% efficiency 1 m2 solar panel exposed to 1,000 kWh isolation will generate about 547 #watt hours (Wh) per day.  Note that my plan assumes that all the solar panels are cleaned regularly and are free of snow.

That means we only need to have about 310.7 billion m2 of solar panels to replace our daily oil consumption. That's only 310,700 km2! For reference, the surface area of Italy is 301,339 km2, so #italy would be too small for the #solarpanels needed for my #plan. It's a big plan.

At first I was thinking that if we used every available rooftop, we could do it without having to buy land, but then I read an article that estimated that the total rooftop area in the United States of #America suitable for solar panels is only 8 billion m2. Since US consumption is about 20% of global consumption, we actually need over 62 billion m2 just for the US, which means all the suitable roofs in the US would be just 12.9% of what we need. Therefore, we will need to find a combination of rooftops and enough #land without #trees, #crops or shadows from nearby #buildings. After all, we don't want to mow down 310,700 km2 of #forest or destroy perfectly good land that could be used for #agriculture by covering it with solar panels! But we will have to pay for the land. Since about 55% of the world's #population lives in cities, we are going to have to buy expensive #realestate in or near cities so we don't lose too much power to transmission. Cost of land in #cities varies, #rural land will be much cheaper, and maybe we can get permission to install some of the solar panels for free on rooftops or over water. A reasonable overall average to account for the $40,000 per m2 cost of land in #NewYork City (where I am sure they will charge for rooftop use) as well as lower cost land in other areas might be about $1,000 per square meter, or $310.7 trillion.

Installed solar energy #cost in the U.S. averages about $3 per watt. At that price, each m2 of solar panel costs about $1,641. That means installing the solar panels for my plan will only cost $510 trillion dollars!

Since the sun goes down and average cloud cover on earth is about 68%, and since we don't want to use #coal or #oil or #natural gas or #nuclear as reliable energy back-ups, we are going to need #batteries.  The cost of a #lithium-ion batteries is coming down all the time, but currently hover around $200/kWh, or about $200,000 per MWh. Since the sun is only up part of the day and since we can have cloudy days, let's give ourselves an average of 10 days of #battery back-up. That means we will need 1,700,000,000 MWh of battery back-up, which will cost about $340 trillion.

Total costs for land, solar panels and batteries: $1.16 quadrillion.

This plan is at an early pre-feasibility stage, so cost accuracy is low The #optimist might say that it would only cost half this much, but it is much more likely that there will be costs we haven't properly accounted for (converting #airplanes, #vehicles, #trains and #ships to be fully #electric; the increase in demand for raw materials this plan will generate; transmission lines, etc.). To cover both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, I've applied a 50% contingency for initial planning purposes: $508 trillion.

Therefore, this plan costs $1.668 quadrillion dollars. That's only about $220,000 for each of the 7.53 billion human beings on earth.

The key to this plan is that nobody in the world can use more energy than we already do. People in #India will have to be happy with their current per capita energy use of 77 MWh per person per year, because if their population of about 1.4 billion ever wanted to come up to a standard of living like we have in North America, each person would be using 9600 MWh per year. That would add another 288 terawatt hours per day of demand, and the cost of my plan would be 170% higher. And if #Africa ever wanted the #energy required to achieve a North American standard of living it would more than triple the cost of my plan.

Who thinks this plan can work?! Do you see anything wrong with it? Let's do this!