Bill Gross argues solar energy can meet future global demand if costs drop enough to compete without subsidies. He walks through why current energy sources fall short and what it would take for solar to become economically viable.
So many of you have seen this before. This is symbolic of man's intangible energy usage. Let me tell you some specific numbers. So the whole planet uses 15 terawatts in continuous use 24 hours a day. 15 terawatts are being used to provide the energy to all of humanity. If you divide that 15 terawatts by about 7 billion people, you get about 2,200 watts per person. So every single person alive on the planet is using 2,200 watts or all day long, 24 hours a day to power our lifestyles. Now, those of us in this room are using a lot more than 2200 watts. Many people in deep parts of India are using 50 watts. So those of us in this room are probably using more like 10 to 20,000. And if we fly a bunch, probably more like 30,000. And if we use a lot of air conditioning and drive a lot, maybe more like 50,000. So 50,000 watts all day long, just making our lives comfortable. And we're mostly burning stuff to do that and just to get a sense of the energy. A typical family has 24 horses running for them at full out all day long, producing energy. If you just convert it to horsepower, just to give you a sense of. We don't really think about the energy because it's burned somewhere else to make our electricity. The fumes go somewhere else. The electrons come over copper, so we don't see any of it. The big pipelines that bring stuff over, it's mostly hidden from us. We go to the gas station, all the tanks run to ground. We fill our tanks and drive around. So we don't see it. If we were actually taking care of and feeding 24 horses constantly, we would sort of be more aware of the energy usage, but we don't. It's really. We've done a good job of making it invisible to us. And another interesting statistic on what's happened just in the last few years in the United states, there's now 1.8 people per household and 1.9 cars per household. So we have more cars per household than we do people. And that just shows our love of. We love taking our bodies, wrapping them in two tons of steel, and moving it somewhere else. And you think about how much energy we're doing to carry that 2 tons of steel along with our bodies. It's just unbelievable. And yet we just do it. Because it's relatively inexpensive, we've come up with a way to make it not cost that much. Now, the problem is if we run out of this stuff, it's going to cost a lot. It's going to cause a lot of resource battles and a lot of fighting. And here's why I think we're going to have some of those challenges. Jump forward to 2050, and it's estimated that we're going to need 50 terawatts. And the 50 terawatts is not so much because of population growth, because people believe the population growth is going to slow down. And we're only going to be at about 9 billion people by 2050. So even with conservative population growth, we're going to need 50 terrawatts because we're lifting so many people out of poverty. And the first thing people want when they get lifted out of poverty is they want their car and they want their plasma screen, they want their iPhone. IPhone doesn't use that much energy. But they want all the electronics that we have and all the electricity production that we have. And if you take the number of people on the planet times somewhat closer, not quite our standard of living, but even a little bit, you get to 50 terawatts. So there's a 35 terawatt gap between the 15 terawatts we're burning right now. And where we need to get. There's only a limited number of places that can come from. Of course we can burn things to get there, but we're going to run out of things we can burn. So there's only a limited number of places. And there's nuclear, geothermal, wind, tides, biomass and solar. And each of these only can contribute about 2 or 3 terawatts. And the reason why I don't really contribute that much is because you build a nuclear, a gigawatt nuclear power plant. And if you built one nuclear power plant every other day for the next 35 years, you only get to a number, you know, sort of in this order. And it takes about seven years to permanent nuclear power plant right now. So you're not going to build one every other day. So you just can't get 35 terawatt gap from nuclear, from any of these. For geothermal. You could put a geothermal power plant at every single site on Earth where there's heat underground and you get about 2 terawatts. So I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. You have to do it, but you don't get 35 from there. And the same thing with wind. You go to every single high wind location on the planet, put a wind turbine, every single one, and you get relatively low 3 terawatts tidal power, biomass. If you go make a biomass plant almost everywhere where we grow food, you can get this 3 terawatts, still only a tenth of what we need. The sun, however, strikes the Earth with 15,000 terawatts. So 1,000 times we're using right now, 500 times the 35 terawatts we need. It's the only one that can really make up that kind of gap with a very tiny fraction. And yet why don't we do it? It's because it's too expensive. If you go back and look, solar is the most uniform natural resource, maybe except for air and dirt. Solar is evenly distributed across the whole planet. The very, very top of the planet, very, very bottom of the planet, there's not much sun, but almost everywhere else there's enough sun to do this with. And everybody gets it. It's not like scarcity, like other of our natural resources. The sun goes to everybody. So it's a really fair resource as well. But it's very, very hard to convert. It cost effectively. It also takes a relatively small amount of land. People talk about how much land it takes, but you can power the whole United States with a square 83 miles by 83 miles. So you wouldn't put it all in one spot, you spread it around, but it's a relatively doable amount of space. And of course, you can power all of Europe with a square about the same size, actually a little smaller in the northern Sahara desert. So you can really practically make it happen if we could get the cost right. And the problem has been that it's been too much. Earlier this decade, solar was costing about four times other ways of making electricity, for example. Now it's down to about two times. We've made a lot of progress in the last eight years, since this chart came out, last nine years. But it's still two times too expensive. So the way solar has been going so far, it's all been with subsidies. And I really believe that solar energy is just a novelty until it can beat the price of fossil fuels without subsidies. So there's a lot of interest around the world, but the governments don't have the money and the amount of money is too great to be able to subsidize the gap between the cost of fossil fuels and solar. But once you cross the price of fossil fuels with solar, then it will take off wildly because then it will be an enormous profit opportunity. Even if you beat the price of fossil fuel generated electricity by 100th of a cent. That would be unbelievable. You don't have to beat it by a lot because it's a commodity. You beat a commodity by a little bit and then just people flock to that because they can make a profit there. So there's unbelievable opportunity if you can just get that last factor of two out and people are working on it.
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