Why I dislike coffee (besides the dirt flavor)

Time to ruthlessly berate coffee! My favorite.

 Worldwide, coffee consumes a heck of a lot of acreage. How much? According so Statista.com, the top five coffee producing countries alone are home to over 13 million acres of coffee, or 20,671 square miles. Although still only 1/4 the size of Kansas, that's pretty significant considering I have never met even one person who can tell me what kind of a plant coffee grows on, whether it's a nut or a seed, what color the fruit is, or how many beans per fruit there are. For something that's consumed in millions of gallons almost daily, you'd think anyone would know what it is.

 Let's say, instead of being addicted to dirt water and the tame legal buzz it gives you, you all got reasonable amount of sleep, you got paid reasonably for work you found amenable, and you stopped drinking it. Considering coffee grows in semi-tropical regions, let's figure out how much of that space would have to be solar panels to power the whole United States. Why not.

According to NREL.gov, in a Louisiana climate, 6 kilowatt/hours per square meter per day is typical, and Louisiana is further north than is accurate for coffee growing, so I fudged the number slightly high because our exaalted government's energy commissions don't offer maps for the whole world. So anyway, let's convert square meters to miles: 20,671 square miles comes to 53,500,000,000 square meters, rounded down pretty violently. We can now multiply those figures by 1.05 (6kWhr, 17% efficient) and figure that our array is good for about 56 terawatt/hours per day, or about 5 times what the United States uses. (I will definitely not say "need" in the context of American electricity usage. I know you left the kitchen light on all night an average of six days a week for the last four years.)

Assuming our usage went up enough to consume this, and the feds sold it at a dime a kWhr (Not bad, average residential is 12 cents per kWhr, industrial is about 7. We'll say highway kilowatts are taxed to make that a more reasonable average), this array would make about 5.6 million dollars a day, or about two billion a year, enough to pay it off in only 4,500 years. (Still more economically viable than the F-35 that costs as much as a $600,000 house for every single homeless person in the US.)

Solar arrays are generally measured in peak output, regardless of how much energy they actually spit out on a daily/yearly basis, meaning ours would be about 9.40 terawatts peak. Now let's say that the $290 billion dollars that Americans alone have put into coffee in the last 10 years went towards this array, we'd be 32% of the way there, and we could spend it on research and manufactory of a federal, or federally contracted, solar factory, pursing greater price advantages, and providing stable federal jobs for scientists and workers alike. But I digress. Look at me, talking about jobs like some kind of politician, everyone knows the solution is less people, not more jobs. Not hugely viable but just some perspective on your coffee habits. I'm sick of writing.

Labor vs Diesel

My town has a population of 40,000 people, 3% of which, or 1,200 people, are unemployed. My town employs a vast fleet of diesel powered vehicles to remove snow from it's many delightful streets, and a smaller private fleet that maintains driveways by commission. Research on the internet (typical) has led me to believe that a truck with a plow costs roughly $30 a job for a simple snow-shoving operation that takes perhaps 10 minutes, and involves only a few passes. If I offered $10 an hour to three people, I bet I could do a more thorough and precise job, even offer individual car cleaning, all the while offering an excellent exercise program, and a starting wage that's well above minimum. Assuming they do the work in half an hour, I can pay them $15 an hour, and spend the extra $8 per job on supplying them with protein-rich local organic snacks. As a worker in this profession, your only equipment concern is your shovel, as opposed the the investment in time and money to own a truck, the initial payment of thousands of dollars, the inexorable upkeep, the insurance. It wouldn't be a living, because you'd only have work during the months of snowfall, but at that wage, and with in mind that there are very few requirements for such work, you could certainly amass some spare cash while helping displace some of our misplaced dependence on extremely cheap energy.

Solar Powered Trains

I had the "bright" idea one day that trains could perhaps just power themselves on solar equipment, so I ran some viability tests. Average CSX train, employing a GE AC4400CW diesel-electric locomotive, employs 4,400 horsepower supplied via a single exceedingly large diesel engine and multiple electric traction motors. This setup can comfortably carry around 2000 tons, or 20 fully-laden 100 ton coal cars, while consuming around 200 gallons of diesel fuel per hour at cruising speed. Presuming non highway-taxed diesel is about $2 a gallon, that's $400 an hour of operating expenses. Now let's say instead of 100 tons, you had a passenger car weighing only 40 tons, and you carried only 20 of them. The load on the engine is down to 800 tons, and I'm going to presume that means half the horsepower is required. The footprint of a standard boxcar is 55' 5" x 10' 7". I'll simplify this to 10.5*55.5 square feet of area, or about 580 square feet per car. Presuming that is entirely filled with today's economical solar cells, which are typically around 17% efficient, in full bright sunlight that would output around 16 watts per square foot. Let's go with 10. Cloudy days, and nights, will obviously not work. With our example 20-car train, the total power output of the cars is 116,000 watts, which translates to 155 horsepower. Pathetic, but considering our theoretical engine is only using half of its' power because of the lessened weight restrictions, that's roughly 7% of the energy for free. 7% of the supposed fuel consumption of $200 an hour comes to $14 an hour in savings. For a 116,000 watt installation, that would likely cost about $1/watt of panel, that would take over 8,200 hours, or 341 days of constant operation, to pay itself back. If, instead, we went with a 5-foot wide strip of solar panels that went down the edge of the track and transferred energy via overhead wires or a third-rail setup, each train would require 6.2 miles of solar to power it's full 2200 horsepower requirement. Considering most trains, especially long-haul passenger trains, frequently operate more than three miles apart, that sounds viable to me. The installations would cost $264,000 a mile, and represent savings of much less than that. I'm really tired actually and this isn't very viable so I'm pretty done, thanks for reading. I want solar powered trains. Put sails on them too, why not.