April 1st, 2021
Breaking news! Evil Dr. Evil is looking for an eco-friendly solar-powered death ray, and he is contracting Freedom Forever for its solar power installation.
When he reached out to the Freedom Forever team, we thought the request was a little odd, not to mention scary. (At least he wants to destroy the planet in a sustainable way?) Other solar installation companies didn’t think it was possible to take on this big project, but Freedom Forever loves a challenge.
After all, our team specializes in custom-built solar systems designed to accommodate any customer’s specific energy needs. We’re used to designing solar power to support homeowners use of major appliances, such as fridges, electric vehicles, medical equipment, air conditioning, etc., but… a death ray is a first for us!
So, in order to put together a custom solar system for Evil Dr. Evil, we first have to figure out, how many solar panels does it take to power a death ray? Our expert designers went to work researching how to suit this very specific customer’s needs. Here’s what we learned.
How many solar panels would it take to power Star Wars’ death ray?
Our solar designers had a Star Wars movies marathon (for research purposes, of course!)! One of the most well-known planet-busting death rays comes from the Star Wars movie franchise. That death ray is estimated to need 1,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 petawatts of power. The number of 600-watt solar panels to produce that amount of power is roughly 190,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 panels. Or roughly 1.9 Undecillion (Yes, that’s a real number!) solar panels.
What about the Nikola Tesla Teleforce?
Then our designers decided to learn from history. Inventor Nikola Tesla is credited with being one of the first people to conceive of building a death ray for real. However, his death ray was never actually built. Nikola Tesla referred to his death ray as the Teleforce, and it was to emit highly-charged electrical particles. His death ray was claimed to have needed 60 Mega-Volts of power. To fire up Nikola Tesla’s death ray, it would have taken over 1.3 million solar panels.
But, later Japanese scientists realized that Tesla underestimated the amount of power needed, so, back to the drawing board!
So, how much solar power does evil Dr. Evil need for his death ray?
Scientific American Magazine estimates that it would take about 15 billion petawatts to make a modern death ray powerful enough for a whole planet. A petawatt is one quadrillion watts. Solar doesn’t generate petawatts – yet, because a petawatt of power is a lot of power. All energy sources on Earth combined don’t add up to a petawatt of power. The world currently uses about 17.7 terawatts of power, which equals 0.177 petawatts… so we’d need some seriously powerful panels, and a whole lot of them, to get all the power needed for evil Dr. Evil’s plans.
Next steps to building solar power for evil Dr Evil’s death ray
All factors combined, our designers are thinking we’ll need about 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – 600 watt solar panels to fulfill Evil Dr. Evil’s order for a solar-powered death ray. This may sound impossible, but remember, Freedom Forever can do it when the other guys can’t!
Now that our designers have done the math, and the solar panels are super-duper-triple bulk-ordered, we can get started with a site audit to Evil Dr Evil’s lair! We actually have him scheduled with our moon-based site audit team today, April 1st, 2021! During this audit, we’ll determine the best placement for his solar panels, and take a peek at his death ray!
April Fools!
Ok, you got us…the Force is strong with you! This is, fortunately, an April Fool’s joke. But the benefits of powering your home with solar panels are serious business. You can go solar with confidence thanks to Freedom Forever’s 25-year Production Guarantee. Let us help you design a custom solar system that can save you money while also helping save the environment, not blow up planets. Let’s leave the death rays to Lord Vader and the Emperor.