What Is the Kardashev Scale?

The amount of solar energy that falls on planet earth defines the Kardashev scale so you can in principle exceed it without leaving your planet. Even if you were ignoring solar power you could achieve this level and do it for a long long time even without solar power. A cubic kilometer of water is like hundreds of years of energy at the stage one threshold. There's actually more energy available than that if you could figure out fission and fusion but eventually we're going to run out of these fuel elements on a single planet.