Solar gets cheaper every year and sunny places get there first. Every patch of land, about 14 km across, is coloured by how far synthetic fuel made from its own sunlight undercuts, or misses, the price its country pays for fuel today. Brightness is people per km² times GDP per person, which is GDP per km²: the brighter the patch, the bigger the fuel market sitting on it. Press play to watch the crossover sweep the world.
Prototype. Each cell's solar price is the best-site price scaled by 5.5 ÷ the cell's PV yield, falling at the chosen rate; synthetic fuel cost is that power price divided by synthesis efficiency, as in the post (plant capex left out). Equal Earth projection, 84°N to 62°S, so every place is drawn at its true area. Data: people, WorldPop 2020 1 km mosaic; GDP per person, Kummu et al. 2026 (subnational, PPP, 2024, doi:10.5281/zenodo.18429133), multiplied cell by cell; sunlight, NASA POWER all-sky surface irradiance (1°, interpolated), PV yield taken as 0.82 × irradiance; borders, Natural Earth 1:50m; everything summed to 0.125° cells. Stand-in: local gas prices are rough regional wholesale prices by country (Henry Hub, TTF, JKM, regulated domestic prices in producer countries), not a dataset. One barrel of oil holds about 1.7 MWh; 1 MMBtu is 0.293 MWh.