Let’s put some numbers together:
Sun Kid's Drawings
If Peter from GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations ) is correct, a 200 miles square collects sufficient solar energy to power ALL human activity.
Let’s assume that:
1- Distribution is not a problem. (either the grid does it, or better, the equipment is locally installed… GENI, cited above specializes in distribution)
2- The 200 square miles takes conversion into account. (which I think it does)
3- $10 per sq foot buys and installs the equipment needed.
200 sq miles = 1,115,000,000,000 sq ft x10$ = 11.15 Trillion Dollars
…Compare that to:
1- The Outstanding Public US Debt as of May 19th 2009 = 11.30 Trillion $
US National Debt
2- The US bailouts of King Henry, Buffoon Geithner & Ben Burnthebank’s friends so far = 12.80 Trillion $
With 6,000,000,000 people on earth, this makes for 180 sq ft per capita or 1,800 $.
Ahem! Is this too simple or are we too freakin’ dumb to get it done?
- Earth surface is 5,488,289,081,985,940 sq ft (approx!)
- 30% is land = 1,646,486,724,595,780
- 50% receives enough sun = 823,243,362,297,890
- The sun shines 50% of the time = 411,621,681,148,945
- And only during the day (50%) = 205,810,840,574,473
- 25% is suitable for solar equipment = 51,452,710,143,618
- Another 50% is lost to whatever = 25,726,355,071,809
(I did the math from the surface of a sphere, but you can check the numbers at wikipedia; they add up closely enough not to waste time arguing.)
Divide that surface by what is needed now (1,115,000,000,000) = 23 times excess energy that can be easily harnessed with today’s technology. Yes, we are talking energy surplus.
Let me give you a few additional thoughts to ponder:
- Energy = Clean Water = Food for all = … = … = Our choice of a future for humanity.
My special salute to Dr Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe who started her keynote speech at the #futuresummit yesterday with “EAT YOUR WORDS” addressed to the KPMG Australia CEO that ignored Africa in his own speech earlier in the day; and generated an uncommon enthusiasm with her truth and integrity.
(see also The Bucky Call, - Bucky Fuller calculated in 1980, that humans’ energy consumption was 1/500,000th of 1% of what our “conveniently located 8 light minutes away nuclear reactor (the sun) delivers every day. In other words, the sun’s energy “cash flow” is 50,000,000 times our needs (yes, that is 50 MILLION times).
- In a world where Politics are established based on a Malthusian concept of inadequacy of resources, it may be time for the powers in place to either wake up to facts or to stop lying to us, by ignorance of deceit.
(See 99 percent of humanity still believes in Malthusian concepts – see also The Bucky Call, Darwin anniversary special part one: The Reality of Natural Selection, and part two: Natural Selection and the Malthusian Principle or Competition for Limited Resources.)
I spent the last two days on twitter, following the live developments of the #futuresummit in Melbourne Australia; I will relate the experience in a soon to come article; however, I would like to share with you the micro-blogging of the above statement (a 200×200 miles square provides enough energy to provide all of humanity); it generated quite a few questions and enthusiasm… see for yourself:
200 x 200 miles square is enough to power all of humanity
Thank you for reading and thinking… Please leave a comment and let your friends know.
Reduced URL for this article: http://bit.ly/17KAjG
Tags: bucky fuller, crisis, Economy, energy, Environment, eternally regenerative, Extinction, finite universe, Future Of Humanity, integrity, life sustenance, Malthus, sense of urgency, solar power, truth
Subscribe via email or RSS
Well it’s about time somebody laid this out in laymen’s language so we can all understand the implications of this staggering idea.
Thank you for this Fred, I will be happy to share this with all my friends.
[...] This post was Twitted by fredinchina – Real-url.org [...]
Thanks for putting this so clearly Fred. It makes a huge amount of sense like that.
We have no excuse not to do this!
To get us out of our current economic mess we are going to need a change in the way we operate. So why not start with getting the power for all humanity going?
Lets get it going for our future.
Ummmm…. Maybe I’m not getting the big picture here or don’t have enough experience with solar power but, what happens on a cloudy day?
OK, we break that 200×200 square mile thing up into manageable chunks, spread them strategically all around the globe and hook each “solar station” into the existing power grids. We take the employees of the major power providers, retrain them and set them to work maintaining the new network of solar stations.
What happens during a thunderstorm? Can you generate solar power during a thunderstorm? Can you pump enough juice from a solar array into a wire to transmit it across hundreds (or thousands) of miles to consumers and still be useful?
I understand the number crunching seems to back up the theory so far, but I haven’t seen number crunching for the physics involved or the logistics.
Break that 200×200 number up again, this time applying highly efficient solar panels to rooftops. Each home, business, shopping center, etc. has a solar roof now. What happens in winter?
I live in Western New York State. We can get up to two feet of snow in a night. Wake up the next morning and NOTHING works. No lights, no stove. Our water works fine, we have a gravity fed system. Our neighbors to the north draw water from Lake Erie through pumps. Gas backup generators only go so long, what then? Ever clear two feet of snow off a pitched roof. I haven’t and for good reason.
What about parts of the world where people live that are in the dark six months of the year? Shall we expect all of northern Canada and northern Alaska to just move south for the winter? They can move into hotels in Vancouver and Toronto where there’s two feet of snow on the roof and no power anyway.
I need to see more number crunching, physics and logistics. Much of your maintenance is going to be tied up in cleaning and or snow removal for said solar stations. Not difficult, but necessary. Panels need to be located in areas that get plenty of sunlight year-round but how far can you transmit the power from those sites?
Figure out those issues and get back to me. By then I’ll have enough money saved up from recycling pop cans to fund the system and we can get moving on the political issues and trying to convince the various unions that they will be better off losing their jobs in the long run…
It is for the greater good of humanity.
Absolutely, Fred. You also get huge economies of scale when you implement these large-scale arrays. There are concerns about destruction of desert eco-systems (these kinds of systems need to be in deserts to be maximally efficient) which need to be taken seriously, and there is also the question of construction and maintenance which is going to be a huge pain in the neck, but one we are going to have to deal with.
However, I have come to believe that there is no single solution to the energy problem. We need disparate locations of production, and there are many different systems we can use. The solution is probably not having 10 HUGE sites, but rather 1.000 medium-size ones. The benefit of creating power in disparate locations (so not just, say, the Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari or Nevada deserts) is that catastrophic damage will not cripple the world power grid, and that you can create a dynamic grid on cloudy days. Remember that storing electricity is wildly inefficient, while using it at the end of the production cycle is very efficient. If all of Europe and Africa goes black whenever the Sahara clouds over, we have a problem.
Luckily, we have high-voltage DC cables of extruded polyethylene which are allowing us greater transportation range and capability than AC cables. This is awesome news. But I still think we should try to get more of the smaller production plants that we have implemented in Denmark (wind) and Norway (hydro).
Personally, I have come to believe that offshore wind and wave power are also going to have to be a part of the solution. Offshore winds are near-constant, very reliable, and with, say, Norwegian hydroengineering skills coming online in this field, could be very efficient, with huge, 50 meter rotor blades getting a lot of juice out of a renewable and clean resource. Turbines are ugly as hell, but they work.
[...] detail and some numbers can be found here on Fred’s blog but it is pretty amazing and surely something that we all should be looking at [...]
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting
You know so many interesting infomation. You might be very wise. I like such people. Don’t top writing.
I think all the “nay-sayers” need to quit being so negative. They are part of the problem. They are the ones that buy into the reality that we can only use oil, nuclear, and clean coal.
You know, the age of Aquarius is coming and when it does the earth’s axis will shift. There is not much we can do about that but evolve. What we can do is not speed up the process of the destruction that mankind has put upon this planet all throughout the industrial age. A lot of us may not be around to use the energy solutions that we are discussing here on this blog. Part of the reason being is because we are discussing them way too late in the game. Part of the reason being is that the earth go through a cleansing process about every 13,000 years which cleans her surface off of all the harmful species. I believe that mankind has been one of the most harmful and greediest of them all.
[...] again! Bending to the fad? Hanging clothes to dry is regenerative, eternally regenerative in an “Eternally Regenerative Universe”, not sustainable. (…) yet it’s worth the price of inconvenience. (…) it’s much more [...]