The earth is in trouble. Well actually no that's inaccurate really the earth is fine
It's humans that are in trouble.
As our society expands so does our dependence on fossil fuels.
And aside from the fact that using these increases the heat absorption in the atmosphere causing global climate to shift
there may actually be an even more dangerous aspect to relying on things like oil, coal, and natural gas as a fuel source.
And that is fossil fuels are limited and one day they will run out.
Not if, but when this happens
all we've built will need a new source of energy and if we can't find one it could all go away.
So whether it's in 5 or 500 or even 5,000 years
whether it's to save the planet or just to save ourselves
We're going to need to find an alternative to fossil fuels eventually.
There's no argument here
But some of us depend on fossil fuels more than others and responsibility on this issue isn't shared evenly throughout the human population
If we look at the top 10 highest energy consuming countries per capita
we can see that Iceland tops the charts with over 50,000 kWh per person each year.
For some perspective; The global average is only 2,600 kWh per person
and the average for someone in the US is 12,000 kWh per person.
Of course high energy usage isn't necessarily a bad thing
and Iceland actually serves as a model for the right way to produce and consume energy.
This is because 85% of the country's energy demand is actually met through renewable resources
like hydro-power and geothermal energy.
But really, nearly 100% of Iceland's electricity comes from these renewable resources
And the only fossil fuel usage comes from things like cars which aren't so easily converted to electric.
Sadly but unsurprisingly.
Iceland's contribution to ending fossil fuel consumption isn't enough to save the world
and is going to take a lot more countries making similar scale efforts to accomplish this.
Probably the worst example of energy consumption comes from...
Yeah, you guess it, the United States.
In total, we use over 3.9 million gigawatt hours per year.
Second in the world only behind you can probably guess this too,
China.
What this mean is that with the population of only 324 million people
America uses more energy than all of India.
Which has a population of almost 1.3 billion or another way to say that is even with 1 billion more people
or another way to say that is even with 1 billion more people
India uses less than half the energy the US does. in total the United States accounts for
In total the United States accounts for 18% of the world's total energy consumption
while containing only 4.4% of its population.
Again this wouldn't be a problem
If the United States was like Iceland and received this energy from clean renewable resources.
But if we look at a breakdown before the country receives its energy from, we can see this is definitely not the case
as renewables only make up roughly 11% of the country's needs.
instead the US mainly relies on petroleum at 37% , natural gas at 29% , and coal at 14% .
All of which are fossil fuels.
And because I can already feel people asking in the comments what's left is from nuclear energy.
You're welcome.
So yeah, not the most sustainable system so far.
Unfortunately, we can't just copy Iceland's homework and make their strategy work for us
Well, maybe in some places we can actually
we have plenty of rivers for damming and Yellowstone is one of the most geothermally active places on the planet.
But these approaches have their own environmental drawbacks,
namely destroying River ecosystems, and intruding on national parks.
Of course these aren't the only two sustainable options and specifically in recent years
The United States has been seeing increasing interest and investment into solar energy.
But what would it take for the United States to become like Iceland or even better?
What would it take to go 100% solar?
So I already said that the United States uses an estimated 3.9 million gigawatt hours per year
Which for simplicity's sake and also because that number is expected to grow we'll just make into 4 million per year.
With current technology it's possible to produce 1 gigawatt hour over 2.8 acres of land using solar panels
This figure doesn't account for things like roads and other infrastructure that would need to be built to accommodate the solar arrays
So I'm just going to round this number up to 3 acres per every gigawatt hour
So to generate four million gigawatt hours about 12 million acres of land will be required
This might sound like a lot but the United States covers an area of over 2.4 billion acres
which means this solar farm would amount to only 0.5% - half of 1% of the country's total surface area.
Yeah acres are a lot smaller than I realized
If all of this were concentrated into a single array, it would look something like this.
In terms of size, this would be just a little bigger than Maryland and just a little smaller than West Virginia
or roughly the same size as Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
If this were made into its own state
It would be the tenth smallest in the country
If this still seems like a lot though
I'll give you some more figures. According to the US Bureau of Land Management
over 25 million acres of land in the US alone are leased by oil and gas companies.
that's over twice the space needed for solar panels just apply 100% of our energy needs
while oil and gas together only provide the country with 66% of its energy demand.
But okay, let's say we wanted to keep these lands extracting fossil fuels so that we could sell them and help pay for the whole project.
Even still, every year the US federal government offers up leases on federal land to oil and gas companies
in the form of auctions.
In 2017, the amount of land offered up reached nearly 12 million acres.
Almost to the exact amount of space needed for our solar array.
Of this nearly 12 million acres have already federally owned
unproductive land, less than 800 thousand acres of it received a bid.
That means there's still at least 11 million acres still open for use that the government would have to spend absolutely no money to acquire. one less comparison
One last comparison I'd like to make has to do with corn
In the Unites States, over 21 million acres are used to grow corn with the specific purpose of converting it into ethanol
to be used as a gasoline substitute, in fact corn grown for ethanol production is actually the second largest use of corn in the country
only behind growing for livestock feed and accounts for 27% of all the corn we grow.
This 21 million acres is again nearly twice the amount of space that would be required for our solar array.
Which could again power the entire country and not just a small fraction of it.
What I'm trying to get across is that dedicating 12 million acres to solar energy production is not only relatively small in scale
It's actually much less than what we're already using for energy production in the United States
and is actually a much more efficient use of our land.
Okay, so knowing that next we need to ask how would this be implemented?
To start, although it would be really cool, we likely wouldn't build a single huge solar farm that'd be visible from space.
But instead split it up into many smaller fields across the country and we would do this for several reasons.
The first being that a single moderately sized cloud could cover this entire array if it was all kept together
effectively cutting all power for the country.
Second, transporting energy always results in energy loss through the heating of electrical cables
and the further you need to transport, it the more energy that is lost.
So it'd be better to keep these solar fields closer to multiple population centers
therefore reducing overall waste.
That being said it would not make sense to spread solar panels evenly across the United States either.
As many areas don't receive the proper amount to sunlight per year to make them effective.
Instead it would be best to concentrate our solar fields into specific high sunlight receiving regions.
If we look at this map of the country which shows the average daily solar energy reaching the surface
we can see several things.
First, the entire East Coast really isn't a viable option if we're looking to maximize the output of our solar panels.
Meanwhile, the American Southwest looks to be the best location for a massive array of solar farms.
This is the result of two main factors
One being the further south you get means there's more sunlight hours and less seasonality over the course of a year
But perhaps more importantly if we look at a map of precipitation in the United States
we can see that this region is arid
receiving the lowest amounts of rainfall and therefore cloud cover anywhere in the country.
Together this means this region receives more direct sunlight than anywhere else in the US.
And in fact in places like the Mojave Desert which lies within this region
a number of solar farms have already been constructed.
These two factors make this land the best in the country for solar production
but one more aspect really makes it perfect and for that we need one more map.
This one shows the land owned by the federal government in the US.
Here you can see a large amount of this land within our desired range is already owned by the government.
Which means money would not need to be spent to acquire any land here.
In short, not only does this project require far less land than we're already using for energy production
but the land that's most suited for solar energy production is also already in the hands of the government
and for the most part lying vacant.
Since we know that land area and ownership is not the issue now
we have to ask what is?
Because none of this matter if it can't be implemented.
The primary barrier to this project is upfront cost.
Solar panels aren't the cheapest thing and actually they're pretty dang expensive.
Estimates for the total cost of implementing such a large-scale solar operation vary quite a lot due to different factors being taken into consideration.
But everyone seems to agree that this project would cost far beyond what the country is capable of right now.
The most moderate figure I've found so between the biggest and smallest numbers given was $24 trillion.
To put that into perspective the entire GDP of the United States is only $19 trillion.
So yeah, this wouldn't be the cheapest project in the world.
If you need something to compare this to the ISS cost only around $150 billion ($0.15 trillion)
and represents a collaboration between 14 countries.
Even still, this solar panel project would cost over 160 times that.
But the United States has completed even more expensive construction projects than this all on their own.
The interstate highway system is often considered the most expensive modern construction project ever completed.
Coming in at a price of $459 billion ($0.459 trillion)
or three times more expensive than the International Space Station.
But still this is nowhere near our solar panel project.
Even still the country has spent more on a singular purpose before
Specifically in recent memory the Iraq war came in at an estimated cost of $2.4 trillion to the United States.
We're getting closer now, we're at least in the trillions
So another way to put this is that a 100% solar power grid would cost the United States ten Iraq Wars
But we'd also gain far more from this project than any war in history could offer.
Yet there are still even larger projects to compare this to.
The closest comparison I can make has to do with a project that's actually underway right now
and that's China's belt and Road initiative.
Which is a mega project with the goal of creating infrastructure corridors throughout Asia Europe and Africa to allow for greater
to allow for greater degrees of trade and exchange across these places.
The project includes the construction of new roads, bridges, freight lines, seaports
and even potentially a unified electrical grid across a total of 68 different countries.
This project is by far the largest in human history
and has come with price estimates anywhere between 4 and 8 trillion dollars.
This is the best I could do to put this project into perspective as it would still be at best three times more expensive than this.
So yeah, this would still be a massive undertaking like the biggest and history massive.
But maybe not for much longer.
Prices of photovoltaic cells and other related technologies have been steadily decreasing
while efficiency and energy storage potential of batteries has been improving.
Whether or not a 100% solar United States is possible really depends on how much research we choose to put into renewable technologies.
Of course solar energy isn't the only source of renewable energy
and perhaps not even the best for our purposes.
In reality, we definitely use other forms like wind, hydro, and, geothermal to supplement solar.
By having a diverse energy network it makes the system overall more resilient in the case of something going wrong.
Just like having multiple sources of income helps give certain people freedom to create content.
Yes. It's the patreon part of the video, i'm sorry.
I just like to say maybe a few of you have noticed
my channel has experienced some pretty spectacular growth recently.
2 weeks ago, I celebrated reaching 10,000 subscribers and now I just celebrated reaching 100,000.
So first I'd just like to welcome all my new patrons and subscribers. It's really great to have you all here.
But also the channel has started to get big enough for me to do sponsorships...
but to be honest I really don't like the thought of doing those.
I'd much rather keep this channel running solely off donation and ad revenue.
So if you'd like to help me in that goal, my patreon link should be somewhere on screen.
Other than that, I hope you enjoyed and if you did, maybe I don't know subscribe if you'd like to continue seeing videos like this.
Thanks!