Just 0.3 per Hundreds of the world’s land has to be covered with solar cell panels to accommodate all energy needs
VCG via Getty Images
Solar energy has been increasing for years and for good reason. It has become one of the cheapest ways to generate energy almost everywhere, and it is one of the best opportunities for combat climate changes.
Still, it still has its offenders. US energy secretary Chris Wright has claimed that Solar could not supply all the energy the world needs. This is crazy and amazingly wrong as many have tilted out. In fact, in the long term, solar energy – including wind that captures the sun’s energy through another mechanism – is the only power source that can accommodate growing energy needs without roasting the planet.
On September 2, Wright posted on Social Media Platform X: “Even if you wrapped the entire planet in the solar panel, you would only produce 20% of the global energy. One of the biggest mistakes that politicians can make is to equate electricity with energy!”
To begin with, electricity is measured with regard to the energy it supplies, so for practical purposes you can equate electricity with energy.
As climate scientist Gavin Schmidt at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies pointed out on Bluesky, the energy content before the use of all the burnt used worldwide was in 2024, 186,000 Terawat hours. He said the land receives 6,000 times as much energy as it every year.
In addition, Schmidt said, if you take into account that 60 percent of fossil fuel energy is lost while talking it to useful force, the soil receives 18,000 times as much energy from the sun as it would be necessary to accommodate the current energy mixture.
Of Race, existing solar panels catch only about 20 per day. Chut of the sun’s energy and you can’t place those places. But a 2021 report from Carbon Tracker estimated that 0.3 percent of the world’s land – yes, just the country – would be necessary to meet the current energy needs of solar energy alone, which is less than the current landfrasting of infrastructure for fossil fuel. In principle, sun and wind could deliver more than 100 times the current global energy needs, according to the report.
Considering meeting the current Energy Dequest with Fossil Fueling is already causing Disstro’s global warming, it is fortunate that there are notch fossil fuels on the planet to supply 100 times as much energy. But what about nuclear fusion? Would it be an even better option than solar energy if it ever becomes viaid?
The answer is no. Eric Chaisson at Harvard University even estimated, assuming modest growth in Global Energy Dequest, for about three centuries, waste heat alone can be enough to heat the planet by 3 ° C. We are talking here about the waste heat produced as generated energy when you cook a boiler or user.
With solar energy and wind and wave power, which is effectively a form of solar energy – the waste heat is not a problem because this energy already ends up as waste heat, whether we use it or not. With other power sources, such as nuclear fission, the heat that is additional heat that is not already present.
“” “[Carl] Sagan used to preach to me, and I am now preaching to my Studins that any intelligent civilization on any planet will eletually use the energy of its mother jerk, ”Chaisson said New scientist In 2012.
While three centuries are far away, waste heat already means regional. Researchers have estimated summer maximum temperatures in Europe are 0.4 ° C higher due to waste heat. At 2100, annual average temperatures in some industrialized regions could be almost 1 ° C higher due to waste heat – an effect that is not currently included in climate models.
The lower line is not onely, can solar and wind supply to all the energy we need for Mary centuries to com, they are the only technologies that can do it without causing catastrophic warming. Wright couldn’t be more wrong.
Topics: