Wow such a great answer, thanks for sharing the thoughts that went into this. It's crazy that there are so many considerations when taking into account the limited speed of light.
The speed of light is most frustrating. I find myself alternately wishing it was infinite or slowed down to 'disc world speeds' depending on which of the two would make my current project easier.
What you describe can be done with self-hosted dawarich instance + the owntracks app. It records location history and lets you visualize it in a web interface.
Yes I've also tried it and reached similar conclusions. Do update it to the latest version though, as I did report an issue with non ASCII characters and for me it got fixed in v0.4.7+
GW and TWh are not the same unit. You need to multiply by the hours of effective sun in a year (and applying some reduction factor for the fact that there isn't 24h of sun every day, nor that the full production capacity is reached)
Even if that doesn't cover the energy demand, the number is not negligible for 438 GW of capacity.
Assuming that the effective full sun equivalent in terms of energy production is only 10% of a day in average, we get:
24 h/d × 365 d × 0.1 × 0.438 TW = 384 TWh
I have no idea about the 10% factor, someone more knowledgeable can coreect me, but, we are not speaking thousands of years if the growth continues before the full energy production value is getting close to the energy demand.
In 2022 the US had ~143 TWh of utility scale solar PV [1]. Utility scale solar PV had a nameplate capacity of ~71 GW [2]. So, the average US capacity factor for utility installations is ~0.25.
Or, for simpler calculations, just multiply nameplate capacity by ~2,000 to get the expected annual generation in Wh.
0.1 is reasonable, allowing for cloud cover and dust films reducing output. Maybe a bit high because often panel nameplate output exceeds capacity in other parts of the chain (inverters, grid export points).
But the 438 number should be 180. Cleantechnica is perpetually over-optimistic. Today, we have 180.
Left implied in the original post, but let's make it explicit: we also want folks to switch from ICE to EVs, and the grid is going to have to increase capacity by an order of magnitude to service all of those. We can't yell "EVs are the future" without understanding that that also means we need vastly more electric power than there is today if we also want people to be able to rely on having power at all times. Because EVs don't charge "throughout the day", they get plugged in at night, all at the same time, and good luck with that on the current grid.
Even if 40GW per year gets us to the current coverage in a hundred years, that's not the target. The target needs to be 400GW a year _at the very least_ and realistically it needs to be a terawatt+ if we want to see it happen in our lifetime.
The target isn't today's grid capacity, nor today's usage. It's the one we can expect 50 years from now. Because public infrastructure gets updated at a glacial pace, and charged at "take what we quoted you, double it, then double it again because lol bribes that you can never prove" practices everywhere.
Americans drove 3.19 trillion miles last year. EVs can go ~3.1 miles/kWh, so if we swapped out all the vehicles for EVs, they'd have consumed ~1 PWh in electricity. That's 25% more electricity than we generated last year.
The total US nameplate generation capacity is just 1.3 TW - including mothballed generators, so I'm not sure why we'd need to add 400 GW of capacity per year let alone get to tens of TW of generation capacity.
Admittedly, solar can't generate electricity all the time, but even with a modest 20% capacity factor, it'd take about 600 GW of solar to generate 1 PWh of electricity per year.
Moreover, we rarely come close to using 100% of our existing generation capacity, outside of a few hours during hot summer days. EVs, being well, energy storage devices that are stationary the vast majority of the time, seem well suited to charging whenever we have excess supply - which is again, most of the time.
> With Legacy Support, organisations running their systems on top of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS can obtain an additional two years of expanded security maintenance and phone and ticket support. This enables IT managers to prepare a detailed upgrade plan for the next LTS
Yeah sure... Couldn't make that plan over the last 8 years, but two more will surely do it.
