Science Fiction Dream

Sometimes I like to write down my scifi dream for solar, just to see if it all adds up, or even approximately adds up.

My scifi dream is to have solar distributed around the world, with maybe a majority in the sunniest places. What percent? That I don’t know.

I dream of this costing under $2/W on average. Big systems and small ones, averaging under $2/W in all. So if this is say about 20,000 TWh worldwide, that’d be 13,000 GW or so, or about 26,000 billion dollars – 26 trillion dollars. You have to remember, the energy industry is the biggest in the world. It moves several trillion a year.

But how do we use this solar? Because it is all during the day, it is too much daytime electricity. We can’t have 4 times as much electricity as the peak demand, even if it does coincide with the peak. We have to move it and store it. The answer is some combination of storage and long-distance transmission. We don’t keep the electricity ‘here’ – we send it overseas when it’s night ‘there’, and we get it from there, when it’s night here. We send it south when it’s summer here; and get it from the southern hemisphere when it’s winter here (and the sun is low for us). We move it around. Then whatever is left, we store. Some of it we store and use in electric transportation.

And don’t complain to me about what happens “when the sun don’t shine.” Because the sun is shining somewhere all the time, and we’ll have the transmission lines to get it here.

This dreamy idea differs from others’ because of the emphasis on long-distance transmission rather than storage. It’s kind of cooler that way, because the idea that the sun on the other side of the Earth is like storage hasn’t really sunk in yet. The losses are similar, too; and whereas large scale storage does not yet exist even conceptually, long-distance and undersea transmission are routine.

12,000 miles of high voltage transmission might cost us 36% losses. But that only means our worst price for transmitted electricity (a fraction of what we use) is 3 1/8^th $ per watt instead of $2/W. And you never know – in the fullness of time, we might beat $2/W, too, lowering this further.

Then what would we have? We’d have a long-lived electricity exoskeleton around the Earth that eventually will cost us very little money to maintain, for generations, even centuries to come.

Now we need the world that’s politically enlightened enough to support it. But to solve that, I’d have to switch genres to fantasy.

Ken Zweibel