World Solar Energy Network... Could this work

### Article Based on Video Transcription: The Potential of a Global Solar Energy Network

#### Introduction

This video, sponsored by EcoFlow, explores a fascinating thought experiment: the possibility of creating a worldwide solar energy network to power the entire planet without relying on batteries or energy storage. The idea is inspired by the concept of chasing the sun—building interconnected solar power plants across the globe to ensure a continuous supply of electricity, even in regions where the sun isn’t shining.

#### The Concept of a Global Solar Network

The video begins by imagining a world where we could harness solar energy from different parts of the globe to power the entire United States around the clock. Extending this idea globally, it raises questions about feasibility, cost, and whether such a system would be desirable. This is referred to as a "godonkan experiment," a thought-problem that challenges our understanding of renewable energy.

#### The Potential of Solar Energy

The Earth receives an immense amount of solar power—173,000 terawatts annually. In contrast, the world’s maximum daily power consumption in 2021 was just 19 terawatts. This means solar energy could theoretically meet global demand many times over. However, the challenge lies in the intermittency of solar power, as it is not available at night and can fluctuate due to weather conditions.

#### The Limitations of Solar Energy

One major issue with solar energy is its unpredictability. Cloudy skies can reduce photovoltaic (PV) generation by 20-90%, making it difficult to maintain a stable grid without energy storage solutions like pumped hydro or lithium-ion batteries. Additionally, the sun doesn’t shine at night, which poses a significant challenge for solar farms.

#### The Idea of Interconnected Solar Farms

To overcome these limitations, the video proposes building a global network of interconnected solar power plants. By distributing solar farms across multiple time zones, we could ensure that at least one part of the world is always receiving sunlight, allowing us to minimize the need for energy storage. This concept was tested on a smaller scale within the United States before expanding it to a global level.

#### Testing the Concept in the United States

The video highlights how solar power from California could be sent to New York City during the evening hours when demand is high but the sun isn’t shining in California. By doing so, we could reduce the need for energy storage by 25% in winter and even more in summer. This idea was extended to explore its potential on a global scale.

#### Identifying Ideal Locations for Solar Farms

To make this concept feasible, the video identifies three ideal locations for solar farms:

1. The Mojave Desert in California

2. Central Australia, south of Darwin

3. Algiers in Northern Africa

These locations were chosen because they receive consistent sunlight and are close to densely populated areas. By building solar farms in these regions, we could generate almost continuous solar power, as the sun would always be shining on at least one of these sites.

#### The Scale of the Project

The video calculates that each solar farm would need to produce enough energy to meet the world’s total demand—173 terawatt-hours annually. Assuming a 20% efficiency rate for solar panels and using utility-scale panels, this would require an enormous number of panels (approximately 123 billion) spread over 82 million acres. This is roughly the size of Arizona.

#### Challenges in Implementing the Project

Several challenges were identified:

- **Production Capacity:** Currently, the world produces only about 200,000 megawatts of solar panels annually. At this rate, it would take 430 years to produce enough panels for the project.

- **Transmission Lines:** To transmit electricity across vast distances, high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines would be required. Building a network of HVDC lines spanning over 46,000 kilometers (28,500 miles) would be incredibly expensive and technically challenging.

- **Geopolitical Issues:** Negotiating the construction of such a massive infrastructure project across multiple countries would involve significant political hurdles. Additionally, there are risks of terrorism and weather-related disruptions.

#### The Cost Estimate

The video estimates that the cost of producing enough solar panels alone would exceed $130 trillion. This is nearly 40% higher than the world’s GDP in 2021 ($96 trillion). Adding the cost of transmission lines and other infrastructure, the total expense could easily surpass $150 trillion.

#### Alternative Solutions

The video suggests that we don’t have to build a single massive solar farm or rely solely on photovoltaic panels. Solar thermal plants, like the one in Morocco, could also play a role. However, even these alternatives face significant challenges due to their high cost and limited scalability.

#### The Future of Renewable Energy

While the project is not feasible with current technology and resources, it highlights the potential for innovation. Advances in solar panel efficiency, energy storage, and transmission technology could make such a system possible in the future. Additionally, the idea of creating smaller, regional solar networks could serve as a stepping stone toward achieving global coverage.

#### Conclusion

The video ends by emphasizing the importance of exploring bold ideas like a global solar network. While it may seem impossible today, such projects can inspire innovation and collaboration across industries. The key takeaway is that renewable energy solutions must be designed with flexibility, scalability, and resilience in mind to meet the challenges of climate change.

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This article provides a detailed breakdown of the video’s content, exploring the concept of a global solar network, its potential benefits, and the significant challenges it faces. By presenting the information in a structured format, the article aims to inform readers about the feasibility of such a project and spark further discussion about renewable energy solutions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is sponsored by ecoflow imagine for a second that we could power the entire United  States with solar energy 24 7. even when the sun wasn't shining by harnessing solar energy from  part to the world where the sun was all without using batteries of any form of energy storage now  expand that idea to the entire world could this be possible how what would it take and how much would  it cost and if it were possible would we actually want to do this yes a worldwide solar Network this  is what I call a thought experiment or a godonkan experiment it's one of my favorite thingsI'm  Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vincione of the keys to carbon neutrality is electrifying everything while that in and of itself is a major engineering challenge and not one we can currently solve in  many sectors of the world economy and equally important issue is covering all that electric  power Demand with clean carbon-free electricity this means renewable energy and when it comes to  Renewables solar is King the Earth continuously receives 173 000 terawatts of power from the Sun  on the flip side the maximum power consumption by the entire world that the max point in any given  day is only about 19 terawatts in 2021 not that 19 terawatts is a small amount but compared to 173  000 so there's enough solar energy then to cover the world's demand almost 10 000 times  over or two thousand times when you consider the average solar panel has an efficiency of about 20  percent in fact we could cover the entire world's current electricity demand if we only covered one  percent of Australia's surface with solar panels so why don't we solar energy has a major problem  which is the fact that the sun doesn't always shine I know big big shocker a cloudy sky can  reduce PV Generation by anywhere between 20 and 90 percent and since we can't predict the weather yet  this unpredictable intermittency makes running a stable grid next to Impossible with solar panels  alone but the bigger problem is that the fact that the sun doesn't shine at night making it  impossible to power a solar farm 24 hours a day so the only way to make Renewables work would be to  store that excess energy which historically has meant pumped Hydro or Lithium-ion batteries the  Pumped Hydro can't be installed everywhere only in places where there's Hills and bodies of water and  lithium on battery Solutions and Supply chains have limited how much of it we can make so yes  solar panels don't work at night but it's always noon somewhere in other words the sun is always  shining down with its maximum power somewhere on the Earth's surface this got me thinking what if  we could chase the Sun by building a worldwide network of interconnected solar power plants  that would provide Power both locally and to the places where the sun isn't shining or river  generation isn't able to meet demand this would allow us to minimize the need for energy storage  since multiple power plants brought across vast distances will more likely be able to cover each  Grid's demand and compensate for any fluctuations in power of generation to understand how this idea  would work and before we tackle the whole planet let's just look at the US this map shows the part  of the Earth's surface that is hit with sunlight when it's early morning on the East Coast now look  at how when it gets dark in NYC we still have three hours of daylight left in California if  we send solar power from California to New York City when it gets dark there we could cover a  full three hours of demand before it gets dark in California New York City gets Sunshine from  6 a.m to 8 pm on a typical summer day and from 8 A.M to 6 p.m in the winter this means we'd need  to store enough energy to run New York for about 10 hours to the night in the summer and 14 hours  in the winter how much energy is that to answer that let's look at the average deal demand for  electricity in New York City during the winter Based on data from 2021. you can see in this  chart that NYC has its lowest consumption around 4 AM and its peak at 6 PM when we add up all the  energy on this chart for 24 hours we get 408 000 megawatt hours or 408 gigawatt hours of demand per  winter day if we add the demand for when the sun is shining 8 AM to 6 PM we get 180 gigawatt hours  so the remaining 228 gigawatt hours consumed at night would be the amount of storage we'd need  but if we deliver power from California to NYC from 6 pm to 9 pm we could off set 57 gigawatt  hours of those 228 reducing the need for storage by 25 percent if we apply the same logic in summer  things get even better since there are fewer nighttime hours in this case California sun power  can offset 35 percent of New York City's required energy storage this is the ecoflow dual fuel Smart  generator yes I said fuel you probably know I love ecoflow I have two Delta Pros two smart extra  batteries and a smart home panel that powers the tuba DaVinci HQ and with these temporary panels  I've produced over 800 kilo hours of energy in the past six months but if the power were to ever go  out and we had a few cloudy days in a row well that's where this dual fuel generator comes in  this is one of the smartest most flexible and efficient generators on the market because it  ties in directly with your ecoflow Delta 2 Max Pro or power kit systems with about a gallon of  gas it runs for up to three and a half hours and produces 5.4 kilowatts of energy on a standard 20  pound per paint tank like this one it runs up to 12.5 hours and produces 2 20 kilowatts of energy  you can turn it on four different ways electric start auto start started with the ecoflow app and  manual start but the killer feature is how it ties into ecoflow batteries set it to fire up when your  batteries reach let's say 20 percent and it'll keep them topped off day or night rain or shine  hope for the best and prepare for the worst that's one of my mantras and with ecoflow generator I  hope to never need it but I have it if I ever do this is ecoflow's biggest sale season and  with huge savings on their smart generator and all their other amazing products check out the  awesome deals today links in the description huge thanks to ecoflow and you for supporting the show  so all we've explored so far covers three time zones in one country now let's say we apply this  same logic to the whole world one solar Network running everything on Sunshine from around the  world each location would produce its own energy during the day and Export the excess production  towards still Night Out in order for this to work we'll need to build a network of solar Farms that  evenly covers all time zones the key requirements for locations will be lots of sunshine throughout  the year lots of available uninhabitable land preferably not farmland and proximity to densely  populated areas the minimum number of solar farms for our hypothetical Network would be three that  way at any given time we either have maximum generation at noon on one Farm or a combination  of lower output in the early morning and evenings of two other power plants based on this map of  potential solar power generation we identified the following three sites for our ideal locations the  Mojave desert in California Central Australia south of Darwin and Algiers Northern Africa  these two locations are ideal since they provide just enough overlap between morning and evening  daylight hours to generate an almost continuous amount of solar power no matter where the sun  is shining as you can see in this table so here Greenwich Mean Time is added as a fixed reference  and cells highlighted in yellow show daylight times notice how whenever there is only one power  plant receiving sunshine it's around 1 pm which is when the sun is at its peak intensity so what  we saw proves that we can generate solar energy 24 7 by building just three solar Farms but each  power plant has to be able to send energy to the entire world this brings two challenges each power  plant would have to be massive and we'd need a way to set electricity thousands of miles away  but exactly how big do these plants have to be and what would be needed to transmit electricity  across such far distances well let's first look at the main components of the system for Generation  we'd obviously need solar panels when it comes to transmission over vast distances we'd need high  voltage direct current or hbdc transmission instead of your typical AC transmission and  there's several reasons for this we'll get back to in a bit so how much generation would each  site need this is where things get interesting in principle we'd need every one of the three  proposed solar plants to produce enough power to cover the world's demand that means effectively  generating 173 terawatt hours how much we use as a planet per year between the three sites  according to solar Global Atlas a utility scale solar farm with the nameplate power capacity of 1  000 kilowatts Peak would yield approximately two gigawatt hours per year that means that  to produce a hundred and seventy three thousand terat hours per year we need to install capacity  of around 86.5 terawatts so assuming we build these Farms with the most powerful utility  scale panels in the market which are rated around 700 Watts Peak we would need 123 billion panels  yeah it's a lot of panels each panel is 2.4 meters long by 1.3 meters wide consider the optimal tilt  about 30 degrees in Australia each panel would have the footprint of about three square meters  so the total footprint in size would be about 82 million Acres that's a little bigger than  the State of Arizona a truly astonishing figure if this sounds familiar it's because others have done  this math and came up with similar conclusions but the interesting part is that we can't just  put this one Mega Farm in one location if we did we wouldn't solve the nighttime issue so  we need to split this up into three farms at least to start each farm would be 27 million  Acres or 207 Miles by 207 miles so is this even possible does the world produce enough solar  panels for such a project according to statista the World produced 178 000 megawatts of solar  in 2020. the latest data I could find based on growth rates let's assume we produce around 200  000 megawatts of solar in 2022. if all those were 700 watt industrial panels that that's about 285  million panels or not even one percent roughly 0.23 percent that means it would take 430 years  to produce enough PV solar panels based on today's production numbers so right off the bat our dream  of a worldwide solar network isn't looking so hot but there's no reason why our solar farm has to be  entirely PV photovoltaic panels let's look at the newer mirror-based thermal plant in Morocco which  produces 580 megawatts of solar energy or the equivalent of roughly 829 000 panels so yes it  would take 123 billion solar panels or put another way 148 276 of these solar thermal systems like  the one at the Nora complex solar power plant in Morocco and yeah that equally sounds really  complicated and really expensive if we could get the installed price down to a dollar fifty  per watt R3 Farms would cost about 130 trillion dollars for context the world GDP in 2021 was  around 96 trillion the entire world so producing enough panels or solar thermal power plants to  power all of this is beyond challenging to say the least but that's not the half of it what about  transmission so when it comes to transmission we have to consider several factors first  transmission lines this map shows an approximate routing for our interconnection for all three  power plants the red dots are the three power plants and the blue dots represent interlinks  or major local grids or substitions the first leg of power lines that go from Australia up through  Asia's most densely populated areas through Russia Alaska and down America's West Coast connect to  the Mojave Desert power station and keeps going south all the way to Rio De Janeiro in Brazil  for a length of about 32 000 kilometers or 19 1800 miles a second 14 000 kilometer line would connect  these solar farms and Algiers to Europe through Spain and then Traverse the Middle East until it  connects to the first line in Beijing this will help optimize energy transmission to most of the  heavily populated parts of Europe and Asia so in total about 46 000 kilometers of DC transmission  lines stretched across the entire world and connected to existing local grids for local  distribution and if you're thinking why would we use DC instead of AC like lower voltage lines  running to your home right now let's talk about power distribution the total power in watts is  equal to the voltage times the current the first thing we need to do is increase the voltage as  much as possible because higher current means more heat and any heat that's created is power lost  this is equal to I squared r so if we double the voltage we could reduce the current by a factor  of two and the power losses by a factor of four this is why high voltage and high voltage DC is  so important high voltage AC has some drawbacks like higher transmission losses due to effects  like skin effect where the magnetic fields created by the AC current forces most of the electrons to  flow at the edges of the wire and not so much in the middle high voltage AC is common today because  the hardware to up convert high voltage AC is much cheaper than high voltage DC so for most shorter  runs AC is cost advantageous but once distances stretch Beyond thousands of kilometers DC is the  clear winner in 2019 the Chinese completed the world's longest HV DC transmission system that  runs on 1100 kilovolts over a distance of 3 300 kilometers or 200 miles with a power capacity of  12 gigawatts so not nearly the size of our system but this is a really good real world data point so  1100 kilovolts times 12 000 amps gets you to the 12 gigawatts how big a wire do we need to carry 12  000 amps and over thousands of kilometers first we need to pick our material we need something with  high conductivity and low resistance here's a list of the best conducting Metals we can choose from  copper and aluminum are the best choices here on price but there's 81 000 parts per million  of aluminum in the Earth's crust compared to just a hundred for copper so to best utilize resources  will be using aluminum for the wiring Plus since resistivity decreases as the wire cross section  increases aluminum will definitely work because as you can imagine we're going to need some  pretty thick wire more on that in just a little bit here's a table with all the calculations  starting with the Chinese hvdc system running at 1100 kilovolts if we scaled up the numbers  from the Chinese system our cost just for aluminum rises from two billion dollars to 31 billion but  it still wouldn't work because the losses as you can see here would be so high that you'd have no  power on the other side your voltage drop would pretty much go to zero so what if we use 10 times  thicker wire well now prices rise to 306 billion dollars just in aluminum and the losses are still  too high the only way we can make this work would be to find a way to get the voltages from around  1100 kilovolts to 1100 megavolts or A Thousand Times Higher if we did that then with a 15.7 inch  diameter wire about that big we could actually make this work but that would require 62 million  metric tons of aluminum and cost 153 billion dollars just in raw aluminum forget processing  or production or anything else the hardware to up convert DC power to such high voltages has  just never been done before and you can bet cost will easily rise into the billions this is harder  to pin down but you can easily Factor another 1 trillion in station substations DC DC voltage up  converters and all the insanely hard and complex systems required to make such a system work then  there is the labor of running 46 000 kilometers of ultra high DC power lines through various  countries and continents around the world this again is hard to pin down but a safe estimate  for the total cost of transmission infrastructure is 10 to 20 trillion dollars so between panels and  transmission lines we're talking north of 150 trillion dollars higher than the entire world's  GDP Beyond cost there are many other challenges to overcome before installing a crazy system like  permits would be a nightmare since we would need thousands of acres of land on very  specific routes just for the massive power lines plus the huge area for all the solar  panels geopolitical instability would also be a major issue we already saw how the war  in Ukraine affected the worldwide energy Supply and is threatening Europe as winter gets colder  on the other hand even if we did manage to round up all the political will in all the  countries governments change and the next one may not be willing to carry on with the construction  of a stretch of power lines and substations potentially jeopardizing the entire project  before completion then we have terrorist attacks imagine if we turn on the system and all the world  was running on solar from Algiers and a group of terrorists bombed that power plant leaving  the world in a blackout as it is the system is too centralized and too easy to target for  anyone who wants to wreak havoc so even though our worldwide solar network is pretty decentralized  it is still really interconnected and interwoven and easy to disrupt weather would also be a major  even though the chosen locations don't get many cloudy days in the year they might one time or  another solving this would require building additional plants far away from each other  so that local climactic conditions don't threaten or cause a major outage so as we're winding down  this thought experiment what have we learned well first of all to build something like this  probably just isn't possible today we don't make enough solar panels the cost would exceed the  entire world's GDP so a lot of planning would have to go into this but the reason why I made  this video is because I've been deeply curious about this what if we actually did pull this off  the cool thing is we could scale this up we don't have to run such massive transmission lines to  start first make the network right and identify locations that want to build plants and maybe  in the future other countries go hey this is a financial opportunity for our country that has  lots of desert land like the Sahara for example we want to participate and sell our energy to  the Americans and the Europeans and the the Asians right so if there's a value if there's a business  use case this could be interesting I think of this as kind of the analogy of roads and railroads when  we built roads that stretch from the entire U.S or the Pan American Highway that goes from the US all  the way down to South America that allowed people to do Commerce much more widely so a Furniture  maker in New Hampshire could make a chair and sell it to a customer in San Diego that infrastructure  investment does open up new opportunities and if the entire world were on a smart grid the next  thing we would need is kind of a micro grid and smart calculations and projections kind of like  a auto bidder Online Marketplace if we built that out you could be incredibly financially  incentivized to have these plants because you could produce tons of power at really Peak demands  for a ton of energy it doesn't really matter at High Noon in the Sahara if the demand spikes in  New York for example at 8 pm right that energy could be sold to anybody around the world so it  is possible if we use aluminum if we invent new DC high voltage transmission technology but how  cool would that be right it's just one of those things I wanted to run out so hopefully there's  some stuff there that you guys kind of learned I've been curious about this I kind of wanted  to know what it would take turns out it would take a lot it's pretty tough to pull off all  right so if you have any questions or comments or other things like that you want us to cover write  Us in the comments below you know we read all your comments and stuff we love making these videos and  until next week check out this video next with you're gonna like I'm Ricky the stupid DaVinci\n"