California has an area of ~423,971,000,000 m^2. average ground-level solar flux is 1kW/m^2. solar panel efficiency is around 20%. the total area of CA could generate ~84,800,000,000 kW (= 84.8 TW) at peak insolation

earth consumes ~113,000 TWh per year, or ~13TW avg, or 6.5 CAs https://twitter.com/MayorOfLA/status/1302726251371667457

that is to say, an area the size of California could power 6.5 entire planet earths if it were covered with solar panels

obviously that's a bad idea b/c CA needs sunlight for other reasons but you get the picture

Los Angeles itself is 1,300,000,000 m^2 = 260 GW of power

LA consumes 22,000 GWh/year, or on average 2.5GW

LA insolation could power 104 LAs

that's assuming complete coverage. If only 1% of LA was covered with solar panels, then LA could power itself

the average city's surface area is about 30% road, meaning that the roads in LA alone have an insolation of 78GWs or 31.2 LAs

anyway just remember: you need to cool your house because sunlight is hitting it and heating it up

solar panels consume sunlight!

also, while they will also be heating up, you can use that heat too, either for heating water in your house or more energy generation

every foot that gets hit by sunlight could have been a tree that creates cooling shade and beauty, but also does so for free, and increasingly so as time goes on

you can use electricity to purify water via distillation. every foot that gets hit by sunlight is purified water that isn't being produced

isn't there some sort of dramatic water crisis in California in recent years???

there's that meme of like

"this would be us right now if only X", with a picture of some retro-futuristic Gernsbackian utopian city. usually these two.

but its fucking true when it comes to making good energy policy ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

even countries with much more authoritarian technocratic regimes, like China, still don't look like this, still don't have ming bogglingly huge deployment of solar energy production, because hydrocarbons and coal are cheaper in the short term

more fun facts: we could recycle every single plastic into pure crude oil sludge and hydrocarbon gases if we use high temperature microwave heating. it would require no complex sorting and separation of plastic types. just pop it in and go

except it’s very energy intensive

another fun energy fact:

in about 2013 or so, germany had such an excess of renewable energy that they decided to use it to manufacture hydrocarbons out of the air, from water and co2, and store that in gas tanks for later electricity production

this process was CARBON NEGATIVE, because it took co2 out of the atmosphere

it was only around 30% efficient but who cares? it’s free electricity!

moreover, the storage is longer term, being gaseous or liquid, and you can ship it around the world

this super cool because it means you don’t need to replace power generation facilities that burn petrochemical! you can just use solar chemicals instead!

generate electricity where it’s super sunny and barren, turn it into hydrocarbons, ship it, burn it

100% carbon neutral

more cool things you can do with abundant electricity:

launch rockets into space.

even assuming you don’t do anything fancy like microwave beamed power launchers, which are clearly the future of space launch, you could just hydro like water into o2 and h2

or if you want, just synthesize rocket grade kerosene using previously mentioned techniques

space launch is expensive but there are ways of making it cheaper if you have abundant electricity to throw at the problem ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

fun feedback loop: cheap space launches mean you can build solar power satellites which have 300W/m^2 more power than ground solar, but take up less ground space

also there is no land shortage in space, no ecosystem to destroy, so if we want, we could also begin building massive space station colonies and migrate into space to leave the earth as a garden world

you could put all major industrial activities in space so that no pollution happens on earth. waste in space will get broken down by solar radiation if it’s light weight, and if it’s heavy it’ll just be literally piled into a big lump

you might worry about a large lump of trash but it’ll never be larger than typical asteroids in the asteroid belt so who cares! just wrap it up an set it in orbit around the sun forever. or if you really want, drop it into the sun and it’ll burn away into nothing

we sit here on earth poisoning the planet because we haven’t been techno-progressive enough. absolutely NOTHING prevents us from living in a society of incredible abundance and wealth and luxury EXCEPT our refusal as a society to BUILD IT

this isn’t like fantasy nonsense it’s boring fucking engineering, or some of it is just boring fucking MONEY

just fucking BUILD IT

oh i forgot, capitalism prevents this

well, guess we’ve gotta destroy the planet instead!

Star Trek Socialism or Barbarism

the climate catastrophe is not inevitable

it’s not even hard to solve

the utopian picture i painted is not impossible, it’s in fact easy

we just have to CHOOSE

we have to remember that we have a CHOICE, that the future is not out of our hands

stop voting for con men who will do nothing, and start building the counter power institutions

don’t wait for permission