3 ms·
What's 'significant'? We're at the point where we are adding gigawatts of solar capacity annually. That feels significant to me.
by Pfhreak 6y ago
What's 'significant'? We're at the point where we are adding gigawatts of solar capacity annually. That feels significant to me.
- kergonath 6y agoSignificant compared to the Earth’s surface area and the amount of radiation we receive. Sure, we get a lot of energy from the sun. But no, we’re never going to turn more than a tiny fraction of that into electricity. The orders of magnitude just don’t match.
- Pfhreak 6y agoOk, but we don't need that much energy. Something close to 200 petawatts continuously strike the surface. Humanity uses something like 15 terawatts. To fully cover our energy needs we'd need to capture less than 1 in 10,000 watts or 0.01% of the sun's energy hitting earth. But I don't think 100% solar is anyone's goal. So we'd need to capture less than that. So it seems to me that we could absolutely cover a significant amount of our energy use.