Global Energy Needs vs. Solar Power Available

Here's why I like solar power: there is a ton of it available. Watching this video got me thinking about that again.

I certainly understand the benefits of diversification, not just using 1 type of energy. There are also the small problems of distribution and possibly storage when it comes to solar (lots of renewables have this problem, but solar and wind in particular - since they rely heavily on geography).

Let's assume that we can store or deliver to anywhere in the world any power that we generate anywhere in the world. If that were true (which it isn't), we'd might want to make 1 big solar power plant.  If we did, it would need to be about 22,903 km². How big is that?

About the size of the state of New Jersey. Or, if we dropped it in the Pacific Ocean, it's the blue polygon on this map:

That's non-trivial to build. But it's a mere speck on the face of the globe. That's how much solar power hits the earth on a daily basis.

 

Other areas on the globe close to 22,000 km²:

• El Salvador, Djibouti, Israel, and Wales are all slightly smaller
• The San Francisco Bay Area is about the right size
• Macedonia is somewhat larger
• Lake Erie and Lake Ontario together are double
• Lake Superior is over 3 1/2 times larger
• Haiti, Albania, or Belgium are all larger

I've done this calculation a few times, so I figured that I'd finally formalize it for my future reference.

Sources

• Note: I'm completely ignoring efficiency (and, as mentioned above, distribution, storage, and a host of other problems) for this mental exercise. I'm also pretending that we have but 1 such solar plant - completely ignore existing solar plants, solar panels on rooftops, etc..
• Image on Wikipedia: there are 89 PW hitting the earth
• We need 16 TW (mentioned in the video and also in the World energy resources and consumption wikipedia article), so that's 0.018% of the available
• The same wikipedia article on World energy states cross section of the earth: 127,400,000 km²
• So we need to cover 0.18% of 127,400,00, or 22,903 km²
• Saw the video on TreeHugger