Just imagine how much energy is required to produce that band at planetary scale.
I'm guessing the amount of energy is less of an issue than the cascading transformation chains the daily solar energy allocation bounces through, less of an issue than increasing insulation factors in the atmosphere, etc.
Would that be about right by your reckoning?
> It probably makes what the entire grid consumes look microscopic.
The entire US grid? Entire global electricity grid? Probably?
Have a shot at putting numbers and units to some of this ... Total amount of daily solar energy fall, total amount of daily energy radiation to space, daily residual energy at sea / surface layer, historic and current human energy consumption (broken into electricity, heat, ??) etc.
It's a handy exercise.
Suppose the area of the equatorial oceans is about 100M km².
That's 2.41e21 J/day potential of hitting oceans, but not entirely absorbed. Put another way: about ⅓ the energy of all natural gas reserves as solar radiation per day.