Oil

• Russia send about 2.5M barrels of oil to Europe per day.
• Barrel is 42 gal.
• About 30 of that turns into fuel.
• 1 gal contains an enthalpy of 200 MJ or about 55 kwhr
• 30 gal of a barrel means 1.6Mwhr.
• Turned to electric at 20%, that is about 10kWhr electric.
• One small PV panel manufacture produces 5MW of panels per year (about 15k panels/yr or about 50 panels per day (15kw/day). This plant costs $4M in India.
• How many barrels of oil electric equivalent does this replace? 5MW*2000hr=10GWhr every year - or about 6000 barrels of oil evey year.
• Daily suck of Russian oil by Europe is 400k cu m. This is a cubic volume about 70 m on each side.
• 250k of such PV operations would need to be created to replace Russian oil.
• There are larger PV production plants - such as lines of 100MW that are fully automated. These can be strung together for say 1GW capacity per year.
• For the 100MW lines - 12k of these would need to be installed to replace Russian oil to Europe.
• Open source swarming would be useful here, if we accelerate PV manufacturing. We could get shit tech today, and bootstrap R&D for the highest performance. What is the limiting step in PV manufacturing? Could distributed production help? Best idea is perhaps an open source facility, and see how fast we can ramp up. If a facility costs $4M for 5MW - selling panels for 22 cents gets $1M revenue, so payback would be long. Maybe 20% margin. 20 year payback.
• Companies make 1 cent per watt margin. Google it. [1]. On a 5MW line, this would be $50k per year. Complete commodification. If we make the silicon cells - that makes it more attractive as that would mean 10 cents per watt (if silicon is half the cost of PV)
• If it's a commodity - is there any need for open source? Yes if the cost structure is fundamentally changed so 5MW gets $1M revenue per year. See