this 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 things
I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
one 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
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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