Let's look at about a 30 seconds excerpt from his intervention in Norway[0]. From 8m7 to 8m38.
Now, he starts explaining the numbers at 8m7s. At 8m38, he's made his point and at that stage, you would be 'convinced'. The interviewer said "Uhuh" (you can hear the audience laugh when she says that). She didn't understand that he has already made his point. (1 kilometre² ==> 1GW).
She says "With you so far" and I smiled because she was completely lost and didn't even know it.
This is similar to Apple's "1,000 songs in your pocket". First time I heard that I thought "How many gigs?" and it frustrated me.
The point of these oversimplifications is to convey a point to the masses. Technical people can find out and understand this and make sense of KWh and what-not.. But you need to simplify to reach a large number of people so that at the very least, the idea of full solar power generation floats in the collective mind.
You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him. You tell him "1,000 songs in your pocket" and everyone can understand that. From child to grand-mother.
You're not the target audience. Yes, it's frustrating, but you're an outlier because you can work out the numbers.
He's trying to make it mainstream. Or else the audience would've been as clueless as the journalist in Norway.
By the way, he goes into more details in that intervention. It's not "power-pointy" and the audience isn't the cheering and laughing for no reason type (they're in the Oil & Gas industry).
> You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him.
I don't really agree with this 'us vs. them' thinking. I'm a technical person, but 2GB doesn't really mean much to me. What bitrate are my songs encoded at on average? Do I use VBR? What bitrates can I get away with? etc. I'd have to do a rough sum in my head, and the only answer I'd get is 'in the 1000s' anyway, so it doesn't give me any extra information. The fact is, even for technical people, approximations and hand waving are great as starting points. They set expectations.
I feel like anything more complicated than that (hard numbers) only have the potential to be misleading anyway, because they let us think we have more information than we actually do. It's only when you actually start working things out that those numbers (so how many GW does a city need? a typical house? what's the variance in these numbers?) become more relevant, but that's not the sort of thing you can do in your head anyway.
The fact is, even for technical people, approximations and hand waving are great as starting points. They set expectations.
Good approximations do this. If you say a proposed wind farm is going to produce enough energy to power 100,000 homes that means something even if I don't know how much energy the average home uses you can still think ~small city worth of power. You can also say electric bill is ~100$ / month so that's 120million / year worth of electricity even if your units are off it's going to be in the right ballpark.
However, if you say it's enough to power 1,000,000 light bulbs that's both ambiguous and not really useful. Because you both wonder if it's 60w or 100w, is that 24/7 or a few hours a day, and you probably don't really know how many light bulbs are in your house or how much energy they use. (TV's and other devices are even more ambiguous.) So, you can't get how much energy that is directly or indirectly.
PS: I still want hard numbers, somewhere even if there not a major part of the presentation.
I don't know, 2GB seems much clearer than "1000 songs" to me. All the questions you ask are even more applicable to the "1000 songs" figure, but on top of that you also suspect that this amount was computed by marketing for some average-lenght low-quality music.
But then again, I'm a technical person, I have an overall feel of how much space my data takes, so I can do a quick estimate in my head.
Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what it really is - a portable storage device that can also play music files. Yes, the less clueless people actually used their mp3 players to move files around, at least before pendrives were as disposable as ballpens.
> Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what it really is
I think that's a really interesting point. What is an MP3 player really? There are probably good arguments to be made for more abstraction ("box to play music") or less abstraction ("portable storage device"). I'd err towards more abstraction in the long run, because that's the only way technology can progress to the truly magical stuff (eventually no one will be able to understand a piece of technology in its entirety, we're already almost there, so why run from abstraction?).
> I don't know, 2GB seems much clearer than "1000 songs" to me.
This is what I meant by "[hard numbers] let us think we have more information than we actually do." Perhaps in this particular instance that's not the case, but I think that stating a precise number might make us feel more knowledgable (or comfortable), without actually adding much actual information, e.g. see people who are focused on what GHz their phone has, or whatever. I agree that these numbers should be available though, but I don't think marketers (or presenters) are being dishonest or misleading for leaving them out; I think they're often actually helping.
But Musk did pitch to the masses. The OP's point of using the organization and structure (problem, state of the art, necessity to change, ideal solution, show a working prototype now, call for action) of the pitch as an inspiration, not the pitch itself, is what counts.
> She didn't understand that he has already made his point. (1 kilometre² ==> 1GW).
I always feel Musk is a little bit too one-sided in his presentations. I mean I'm obviously on his side, and it does make sense for certain audiences to present solar as this amazing solution that is a TOTAL no-brainer... because you have to fake it 'till you make it, and if you genuinely believe that solar is an awesome (part of the) solution at the end of the road (as many do, including myself and Musk) then these white lies can be warranted. But still it irks me a bit.
For example he'll say 1 km2 is 1 GW, because 1 m2 is 1000 watts of solar energy. Here's an excerpt from McKay's (free) book Without the Hot Air, a Cambridge physicist professor wrote it and I can recommend it.
> The power of raw sunshine at midday on a cloudless day is 1000W per
square metre. That’s 1000 W per m2 of area oriented towards the sun, not
per m2 of land area. To get the power per m2 of land area in Britain, we
must make several corrections. We need to compensate for the tilt between
the sun and the land, which reduces the intensity of midday sun to about
60% of its value at the equator (figure 6.1). We also lose out because it is
not midday all the time. On a cloud-free day in March or September, the
ratio of the average intensity to the midday intensity is about 32%. Finally,
we lose power because of cloud cover. In a typical UK location the sun
shines during just 34% of daylight hours.
The combined effect of these three factors and the additional compli-
cation of the wobble of the seasons is that the average raw power of sunshine
per square metre of south-facing roof in Britain is roughly 110 W/m2,
and the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of flat ground is
roughly 100 W/m2.
So you get a raw power of 100 w/m2, already an order of magnitude less. Then you take that energy and hypothetically apply PV panels to it, say averaging 20% (20% panels obviously exist but they're a bit more expensive and therefore this is already a rate that's a bit higher than today's average, but doable in the long-term) and you end up with 2% of his 1 GW per km2 in practice. (at least this is for a typical UK square metre, can be higher in a sunny US area), and only 0.5 kwh per average day per square metre of panel.
If you then add to that installation / maintenance costs, and costs of new infrastructure (from transportation to storage) and look at the inefficiencies there, it's not quite true to say 200 km2 will simply do it, hell even if you ignore all that.
With the figures above you get 100 gwh per day of electricity from 200km2 of panels (before storage or transportation). Now he said 'power the US', not 'power cars' or 'power homes' or 'power businesses', but the US, unless I missed something.
Now the US uses about 100 quadrillion BTUs, which is, rounding quite a bit, very roughly 30 million gwh per year, or about say 80k gwh per day. We just established that based on typical UK land with nice panels you get about 100 gwh on 200km2 per day. Yet he says that these panels can power the entire US? It's off by a factor of 800x. Even if you say instead of powering the US, let's power only homes, or just transportation, so you're now off by say a factor of 200x, and then you say well let's put these panels in much better circumstances than the UK, and get 4x more sunhours on average, you're still off by a factor of 50x. I'm sure I've made a few mistakes here and there but I don't think any of this order of magnitude.
Another comparison is the Topaz farm, which has about 0.12 gwh per km2 of daily average generated power. To generate the 80 thousand gwh we use every day, we'd need 664 thousand km2, not '150 to 200 km2 to power the US'. It's insanely wrong to the extent I keep double checking my numbers cause the odds are far bigger than I'm wrong, not him, but I'm not seeing any real mistakes here. Agua Caliente solar project has about (very roughly) 0.18 gwh per km2 generated daily, similar story. Huanghe solar park in China has a 0.15 daily gwh per km2 rate, similar story. Even if you consider that yes, not every single metre is covered and a bunch of other factors etc (many offset by other factors by the way), you need orders of magnitude different results to get anywhere near Musk's figure so I'm not seeing how adjusting for slightly more accurate numbers gets anywhere close to his story.
Anyway I'm not a big energy guy so I'd love for others to enlighten me. Cheers.
tl;dr I really like Musk, I'm a big fan of solar, but I think he's doing a ton of hand waving in his 'we only need xyz and we could go fully solar' to the extent it's just completely false and I've seen it too many times now. Part of that is fine because I'm of the opinion we can at times be allowed to present things better than they are to get the ball rolling and I'd love to get the solar ball rolling (faster), but there are limits.
Let's look at about a 30 seconds excerpt from his intervention in Norway[0]. From 8m7 to 8m38.
Now, he starts explaining the numbers at 8m7s. At 8m38, he's made his point and at that stage, you would be 'convinced'. The interviewer said "Uhuh" (you can hear the audience laugh when she says that). She didn't understand that he has already made his point. (1 kilometre² ==> 1GW).
She says "With you so far" and I smiled because she was completely lost and didn't even know it.
This is similar to Apple's "1,000 songs in your pocket". First time I heard that I thought "How many gigs?" and it frustrated me.
The point of these oversimplifications is to convey a point to the masses. Technical people can find out and understand this and make sense of KWh and what-not.. But you need to simplify to reach a large number of people so that at the very least, the idea of full solar power generation floats in the collective mind.
You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him. You tell him "1,000 songs in your pocket" and everyone can understand that. From child to grand-mother.
You're not the target audience. Yes, it's frustrating, but you're an outlier because you can work out the numbers.
He's trying to make it mainstream. Or else the audience would've been as clueless as the journalist in Norway.
By the way, he goes into more details in that intervention. It's not "power-pointy" and the audience isn't the cheering and laughing for no reason type (they're in the Oil & Gas industry).
[0] https://youtu.be/0ZsVxSDB7NY?t=8m7s