Land use game

I watched a video by the excellent Dr. Simon Clark on YouTube this morning and I thought it might make a fun little educational game. I enlisted the help of the Anthropic AI, Claude, to help. In short order, I made this little thingy that seeks to have an idea of how much land would be needed for 100 % of a country’s power use to just come from solar energy – we should be farmers of the sun, as Adam Tooze says. I’m open to anyone’s request for a specific country. Try your luck here: Land use game (put your country suggestions in the comments below)

I know that solar isn’t enough to power a country alone (except maybe for Australia). We need to rely on many clean sources for redundancy and flexibility. The idea behind my game is to see just how much land would be needed if you only used solar power and storage.
Update 260621: For the first day of summer, I added a new function to show just how much of the world would need to be taken up if we were to power it purely from solar power and batteries. The answer is pretty surprising. I also normalised the score so it is now a percentage rather than out of 800.

Update 260905: Derek Scott on Twitter requested Canada be added to the countries, so I was pleased to do so. If there are countries that aren’t covered, drop me a comment on this page or tweet me @beevee23 on Twitter and @beevee23.bsky.social on BlueSky

Update 260628: Added Egypt. Comment on this post if you want to suggest a country or have a comment about how the site works

Update 260704: Happy birthday, USA! I added Greenland, which could – on its own – supply enough electricity to meed current electricity needs through solar power alone. Have a look and see how

Update 260714: Happy Bastille Day, France! I decided to make the Earth map more proportionally correct with version 5 of my game.

Update 260726: I added the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to countries in my game, today. There’s a note about artisanal mining of cobalt included, much cited by the anti renewables brigade.

Update 260811: It’s taken a while (Claude tokens do less and less and I’m not paying for a subscription), but Sweden has been added. There have also been some backend changes that might homogenise and simplify some stuff.