Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)
landartgenerator.orgThe square km the US uses to grow corn for ethanol is about ~~ 1/3rd the total global area required for solar in this article. Ethanol that is a gigantic waste of resources.
They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.
Yes, and the corn-based ethanol here is used for "feeding cars" that have combustion engines, i.e. it's already used exactly for energy production. The most recent Technology Connections video[1] quoted some numbers on this. All this land dedicated to disposable energy production could be dedicated to renewable energy production instead.
Such an unfathomable waste when you put it in the context of “feeding cars”. I really appreciated the way this channel broke down this viewpoint. Made me want to finally get some panels for my balcony.
I feel like a chunk of the video was kinda pushing against the idea of just putting some solar on your roof.
upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.
What does "wasted" mean in this context?
i assume heat since most energy in an ICE engine is wasted to heat (~60% wasted iirc)
It means that it doesn't generate any mechanical work, it's wasted as heat not captured for any other productive purpose (since waste heat can be useful in some contexts).
It's a measure of efficiency.
Your main point still stands, but aren't both of them renewable? Corn is a renewable resource, thus ethanol derived from it is too. It's just seemingly a much less efficient renewable fuel for powering a car compared to solar.
Even ignoring all non renewable consumption in growing the corn to be turned into ethanol it is still going towards an incredibly polluting infrastructure.
While each solar panel is a small step towards more and better electrification
You're right. Perhaps clean would better capture the distinction in favor of solar in this context? Both corn and solar convert insolation to usable power with a short time between capture and use. Solar, on the other hand, is net negative when it comes to emissions, while the corn harvest is just burnt with the CO2 escaping back to the atmosphere. (And potentially, the solar panels can just be recycled back to new solar panels when they reach the end of their lifetimes. They're mostly aluminum and glass after all.)
Corn ethanol isn't a renewable resource. The land use of corn is a problem, but it's rounding error compared to the petroleum consumption of that industry, or the topsoil degradation.
To get one Joule out of corn ethanol, the US is burning more than one Joule of oil. This is probably the main reason corn subsidies are so popular politically. They serve the oil barons, mega farms, and big agriculture firms like Monsanto.
On top of that, modern farming practices degrade topsoil over time. It's gotten a bit better than the Dust Bowl days, but we're still burning through topsoil at crazy rates, and it is beyond current technology to manufacture new topsoil.
So, ethanol corn is like heating your house by dumping gas on a field and burning it to boil water. Then you carry the water inside. There only difference is the number of levels of indirection.
The last I checked, it took less energy to make a solar panel than the expected lifetime output of the panel. So, at least you can power solar factories (in theory) with solar. There's still the problem of the environmental impact of rare earth refining, but at least it's a second order issue, and not like the first order issues corn ethanol has.
(Note that not all ethanol farming is as dumb as what the US does: For example, Brazil has had a net positive energy industry from sugar ethanol for a while. They "just" have to clear cut the rain forest to replace the farmland that house of cards is destroying.)
> The last I checked, it took less energy to make a solar panel than the expected lifetime output of the panel.
An order of magnitude less.
The USA grows something more like 121,000 square kilometres of corn for ethanol.
Or about 30 million acres if you’re in to that sort of thing.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
Add in concepts like agrivoltaics and that land could still be productive as arable farmland while it also produces clean energy.
Yep. 5% of all US land is dedicated to just growing subsidized corn.
Most of that land probably isn’t useful for much else, in a productive economic sense.
Except for solar panels. If the corn is subsidized, then the land is not economically productive right now.
Realistically, can we expect anyone to want to build out solar without subsidies?
Yes, because solar is now the most cost-effective form of energy generation. That’s why grid-scale solar is being deployed on a massive scale world wide.
Globally solar is going gangbusters. At that scale it can't be subsidies.
Companies want to shut down coal plants despite subsidies but are being forced to keep them running. The government forcing private businesses to keep running in a certain way, doesn't get more state-directed than that, straight out of communism.
It's really China with none of the upsides and all of the downsides.
Lots of people do today. Solar is profitable without subsidies.
Yep. Traditionalists hate renewables and facts. Here in Texas, there's been an absolute boom in solar post snowpocalypse. I'd gladly vote for shifting corn and soy subsidies to renewables, especially as grants for 1-300 MW solar/wind facilities for municipal co-operatives. And for solid state and sodium municipal and infrastructure energy backup and v2g.
And, I think we should heavily tax data centers federally because they're electricity, water, and land extractive and sound pollution vampires hostile to communities they invade (often to the chagrin of locals because of NDA backroom deals with corrupt politicians).. they're tantamount to giant petrochem facilities in "sacrifice zones". The rich people can cry about leaving, as did FDR's friends did, but it's always an empty threat.
I'm not convinced the data center numbers, especially water, are meaningful compared to absurdly wasteful agriculture like the corn for ethanol mentioned here, almonds in California, and cattle.
Let alone the likes of Nestlé's water stealing and golf courses in hot, dry climates.
Happy to be proven wrong by someone who has the numbers. For now like what this comment section is about with "the space needed for solar is nothing compared to what we're already doing", it seems like the water needed for data centers is nothing compared to how much we're already throwing away.
I did a napkin calculation once for building wind turbines next to a city with a construction and a maintenance tax. A big initial bill (lone) and a sizable ration per citizen. In stead of a power bill you pay installments. When you sell the house the next owner will also have to pay for it.
Thinking about it now, i have one more stupid idea, people have no faith in government, perhaps it is possible to contract a private insurance company. They can get paid to keep an eye on our bureaucrats. Make it a contract with teeth.
Except transporting it over the grid usually doesn't make sense, and is neither easy nor simple nor cheap. So solar only really makes sense if you have a use for it nearby or even onsite. So for companies/factories/datacenters/... absolutely. To keep cities powered? Less so.
It's simpler and cheaper than any alternative.
You just need ultra high voltage transition lines and a grid that can real-time redistribute load + generation.
Ultra high voltage towers are all over Texas. If they can make them work there (with the extreme heat, tornados and absurdly long distances involved in that state), they can work most places.
Only if you like free electricity...
If the goal is to make ethanol hemp would be a (considerably) better choice.
We know it is but with all the hysteria we have very little experience growing and processing it with modern equip. You should want to harvest seeds, fibers, make ethanol from biomass, and perhaps do biochar, concrete, textile, plastics etc etc
The hysteria is rather fascinating, I recently learn how the inquisition got rid of Amaranth.
If only we could figure out how to do something with water hyacinth. No one has ever complaint about not having enough yield of that. It grows preposterously.
We pretend the crop to be a huge problem, much like the giant lakes of poop we produce. Most of the energy in food comes out on the other end.
Solar farms produce 50 times more energy per acre than corn grown for ethanol.
A rabbit hole I started working down was how much ammonia would cost is the hydrogen was from electrolysis power by solar. It's sort of competitive.
Whack bit. 2200 calories a day is 2.5kwh. That's what a 400W solar panel puts out.
Which made me wonder about just synthesizing amino acids directly. Why make ammonia and spray it in crops that use sunlight (2% efficient) to turn it into protein.
You start digging an there are two dozen companies working the bioreactor angle. Hydrogen + N2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
I find this way more interesting than using AI to replace MBA's and code monkeys.
The easiest food to synthesize is probably fatty acids. Orca Sciences (the people who incubated Standard Thermal) have had a project on this.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/food-without-agricultu...
I felt this was telling:
> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.
To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.
Markets allocate resources based on supply and demand. Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems. It’s tragedy of the commons every time.
> Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems
Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.
Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.
How much money does a golf course bring in yearly? How onerous are the regulations?
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
Let's compare to agriculture.
An acre used to make hay might bring in $500/year.
An acre used for PV might bring in $25,000/year.
If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?
I’ve looked into buying grassland. It’s in in the middle of nowhere. $25k/year is before maintenance and grid hook-up costs, both of which will be substantial in the middle of nowhere.
> If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?
If we’ve worried about land why not go for nuclear? Just plant nuclear reactor seeds add fertilizer and power plants spring up in a few months.
See it doesn’t quite work that way. It brushes away too many variables.
It's probably easier to build a solar farm than prepare new land for hay production at this point.
Have you noticed the price of beef going up? It's because we're losing arable land to climate change. It takes a large number of high quality acres to raise a cow on grass.
That's been getting less and less feasible over time between extreme weather and erosion, so the cows get hay instead.
Hay production in places like Texas is disrupted by drought every few years, which means that ranchers have to sell their cattle at a loss or let the cows starve in the fields (assuming they don't die of heat stroke - the cows and the farmers).
After a few bad cycles like that, the ranchers start selling off land, so there aren't enough cows even in good years. Presumably this is bad for hay farmers, since demand attenuates down to what it would be in a drought year.
That brings us to 2026. It's pretty clear what's coming next.
Also what is the capitol cost to stand up a golf course vs. a solar farm of equal size? I would imagine solar requires locking up a much larger investment.
For PV, land will be a very small fraction of that capex.
Yeah; golf course land tends to be in places with high property values.
If we normalize by $ instead of by acre, the hypothetical golf course conversion would produce >> 10% of land requirements.
I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.
Nice expression, but the book by the same name is fatally flawed in its science.
I don't think its lack of land that is preventing 10% of our energy coming from solar. Do you really believe that without golf courses there, the land would be used for solar instead?
Lack of land where you’re permitted to build solar is actually a real problem.
Nuclear bros will tell us political obstacles can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. So let's apply that procedure.
There is no magic hand, only a Tragedy of the Commons and greedy individuals doing whatever. (Federally, there is at present time little-to-no prosecution of fraudsters or tax cheats. Economically, it's basically The Purge.)
Appropriate regulations and enforcement is what is missing but ⅔ of country is brainwashed by billionaires and Fox News that "gubberment bad" and "regulations are communism".
For values of ⅔ ~= 40% and rapidly falling.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-approval-ratin... https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slip...
Assuming we're even a semblance of a democracy in 2028, the US is about to see its biggest course correction since the New Deal.
I think this will include a return to a free market economy.
If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies, an army of independent prosecutors, armed with the power of federalization, reorganization and secondary public offerings of reformed criminal enterprises. The "good guys" companies would only be subject to monopoly busting; their investors would not take as big of a bath.
The crazy thing is that, as I get older, I've found I've gone from the hot-head to the voice of reason in conversations like this.
Rapidly falling? Looks like it's hit an equilibrium since October, >=40% at this point is hilariously high and proves the point well enough.
> If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies
I'm sure you're aware that the overwhelming majority of these go to agriculture. If you genuinely think whoever gets elected will be running on stopping those, that's blindly optimistic.
Land is cheap, so why not golf courses?
Not in cities (where most people live) it isn't
If only we had a way of transmitting electricity from elsewhere.
A long article, about rising prices driven by fossil fuel costs but also a lot of positivity as you read towards the end and a sudden sharp downturn that’s coming to Australias power prices. Australia’s wholesale power prices halved in q4 2025 due to massive solar and battery investment that on a per capita basis dwarfs china. Australia is now over 50% renewables. It’s set to accelerate too.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.
The EU had wind + solar overtake fossil fuels last year too.
Fossil fuels are now less than 30% of electricity generation.
Alas, there's a ton more burning which is not electricity, but progress is undeniable
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
The US did too, despite Trump trying to block it.
> wholesale power prices halved
Who cares?
No one pays the wholesale price.
What price does the retail customer pay?
Retail prices obscure the underlying economics via taxes and subsidies.
Here the wholesale prices are far more relevant economically.
Indeed.
Still, what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
If politics is a significant cost factor, no amount of technology is going to fix that.
Or, as Jimmy Carr put it: But you go, yeah, you can have net zero, as long as you don't give a fuck about poor people, right? If you don't give a fuck about poor people, of course we can do net zero. - https://youtu.be/H3FwqPkPSHE
And he’s just wrong.
> what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
The underlying economics means someone is always paying for that, you can pay for more expensive fossil fuels in your taxes or on your electric bill but it’s going to happen either way.
Granted we have a legacy of fossil fuel, nuclear, and yes early renewable projects but if you have zero subsidies of any kind going forward we get to a 100% emissions free grid because today that’s the cheapest option,
Burning fossil fuels has had an over a century of technical development and global scale it isn’t getting dramatically better to catch up it just loses and renewables just keep getting more appealing over time.
Poor people are hit hardest by the effects of climate change.
Empathy isn’t universal.
I care less about poor people in poor countries in far away lands, and far away times, than I do my fellow citizens in my relatively wealthy country.
And my fellow citizens, especially the low income folk, are affected everyday by high energy costs. High energy costs result in higher costs of everything.
Whereas the effects of climate change, to the extent that they’re distinguishable from extreme weather events at all, are largely tolerated by even the poorest here in Australia.
High energy costs makes extreme weather events less tolerable.
It is good then that renewable energy is cheap. There are a million things countries can do to help poor people. Burning fossil fuels is very far down the list.
> that renewable energy is cheap
Where is this the case?
There is what? Approximately nowhere with high renewables penetration and cheap retail energy prices.
Australia has so much coal and gas we could have electricity plans similar to data plans: all you can reasonably consume for $80 a month, and it would still make approximately zero difference to global anthropogenic carbon emissions.
We’re plenty happy for everyone else to burn our LNG and coal. Our LNG is cheap the Japanese even resell it a profit.[1]
Instead, we have high renewables penetration and electricity prices that have increased at a rate three times higher than general inflation.
1. https://ieefa.org/resources/how-japan-cashes-resales-austral...
You’re replying in a thread about energy prices dropping because of renewable energy.
Do you accept that wholesale electricity prices in Australia can be wildly disconnected from residential retail prices?
Do you accept I am an Australian resident retail customer telling you I am not seeing any change in my $/kWh price, nor any offers from my any providers offering lower prices and higher solar input price than the plan I’m on now.
It doesn’t matter if wholesale prices are zero unless energy retailers are willing to compete to drive prices lower.
And they’re not. It’s a regulated market here in Australia.
If somebody comes up with a way to produce wheat cheaply, do you blame them for high bread prices?
Energy retailers in Australia are literally just a billing interface and a poor excuse for a call centre.
They’re not really adding value in the same way a farm & associated agribusiness > harvest > global storage and distribution > mill > commercial scale bakery > distribution > retail outlet does.
This reminds me of an amusing comment I read or heard the other day: eggs are now more expensive than chickens. Somethings not right there. And it’s mostly higher costs of energy, and extremely stupid egg production regulations.
I fail to see how the blame is on renewable energy and how burning more fossil fuels would help in that situation.
What was his point? If he'd been more specific, his comment would be true:
"If you don't give a fuck about [extracting revenue from poor serfs], of course we can do net zero."
If we lived in a more just society, we'd mandate community net metering: This is the idea that (say) a city block can build a solar/wind farm anywhere within a few dozen miles of itself, and then have their bills proportionally reduced by the amount of power that farm produces.
It enables interesting economic models, like "the community takes out a 30 year mortgage to build + maintain the farm in exchange for an immediate halving of their electricity bills", or having trade schools offer free/cheap electrician programs that include apprenticeships building such farms. (See also: Habitat for Humanity.)
The more power you consume the closer to wholesale is your price. I’m sure Aluminium smelters or fertilizer plants care a lot about wholesale prices.
No residential retail customer in my country qualifies for any high-usage discount, as far as I’m aware.
Only big industrial users do, and even the largest industrial users I’ve worked for, or adjacent to, in my state don’t come close to amount of electricity used by the aluminium smelter.
Green isn't supposed to save people money. It's just a shift from bit oil to big green if you're interested in the money part.
The land use issue is the main reason why we still need moonshot research into things like fusion. As a species we have always been limited by the cost of energy. I was shocked when I learned that world energy consumption was ~13 exajoules in 1800, ~18 in 1820, ~75 in 1945, and ~550 in 2020. Energy consumption from the Founding Fathers to WW2 only rose by a factor of four!? We went from horses - 1800 was before the first steam train - to supersonic flight with only six times the energy!? And today, in the time of the hyperscalers, we use only 30x the energy of 200 years ago!
With solar I doubt we will see costs well under, say, a half cent per kWh. Even when the land and panels are ~free, the surface area of that much aluminum/glass/wiring/infrastructure has a cost. And a half cent is cheap, but not too cheap to meter. You could get a barrel of oil in the late 1800s for ~$20 of today's money, roughly 1 cent/kWh of thermal energy or 3 cents if you run it in today's plants to make electricity. The idea that a _time machine to the 1800s_ would be a cost-effective way to obtain energy is patently absurd and I suspect the man with a handlebar mustache who would sell you the energy would think it similarly absurd; it certainly isn't true for any other serious industrial input. But energy is unique.
At 0.5 cents you're not going to scale global energy use by orders of magnitude. And if you want any of the various promised sci-fi scenarios (flying cars, large scale high speed travel, scaled up space travel, true recycling) you need orders of magnitude more energy.
Don't get me wrong, solar is a great solution for today. But I don't think it's the solution for the future that many people dream of.
I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying nukes, why should there be orders of magnitude between today and [insert scifi]?
No, the real question is, where the hell is this exponential increase coming from? I think anyone would agree that, along most obvious metrics, the difference between 1800 and 1945 is much more pronounced than between 1945 and 2020. Yet the first was a 4x increase, and the second, over 7x. And in a third the time, too.
I'd like to see it broken down by country. I'll bet a lot of the increase actually comes from very poor countries turning into rich ones. In the west, our at-home per-capita energy use has not changed much from 1945 - may even have declined for some demographics (1945 houses were poorly insulated). But China lifted some hundreds of millions of peasant farmers into a middle class existence. That's got to be a bigger factor than the fact that I own a laptop and my grandpa didn't.
There’s an updated article as of Aug 2021 too: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565
The biggest impediment to clean energy, which is actually cheaper than fossil fuels, is politics. We have political interference at the highest level to impede solar, storage, and wind.
In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...
And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...
This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.
In Australia we have so much solar that wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day. Despite that we still have high retail prices. Domestic battery installations are getting popular and will help.
See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
How do domestic battery installations help with the retail price of electricity?
Two ways that batteries reduce costs:
1. Time arbitrage of energy. Store energy from times when it is abundant, and put it back when it's more scarce. This is profitable on most grids with at least high single digits of percentage of renewable generation. And to say it's profitable for battery operators is the same thing as saying it's reducing costs, if the grid/utility is operated in a fair way.
2. Location arbitrage of electricity by making use of times with less grid congestion. The grid itself is the only location arbitrage we have had up until grid-sized batteries. But it's expensive, and the costs are not even. Some locations are far cheaper to service than others. Battery storage has long been a "non-wired alternative" that in many cases is cheaper than stringing wires to expand capacity.
There's probably more that I dont understand. Battery storage on the grid is a disruptive technology, because up until now the grid was pretty much the only major system I could think of that doesn't have any storage. (Computer networking is kind of similar, but buffers have always existed. It just turns out that buffering is not tremendously useful in the network itself when the endpoints have tons of storage...)
In the US, transmitting and distributing electricity is more expensive than generating it. That imbalance is going to widen far further as solar and wind get cheaper, which they will for a minimum of a decade, based on the current pace. They could get cheaper for multiple decades. We don't really know what the floor is going to be, but we do know it will be electricity far cheaper than we had imagined from any other technology up until now.
More domestic batteries reduces the electricity demand at night, meaning power companies need to buy less natural gas and coal powered electricity from producers.
They lose some solar generation during the day that is now going into charging the batteries, but they have too much of that already.
Net result a lower proportion of (more expensive) fossil fuels in the overall mix, meaning total cost of power generation comes down, and retail prices come down.
It's customers fleeing high prices by making more of their consumption themselves.
This is happening in the US too. We're creeping closer and closer to the day where just installing off-grid battery + PV is cheaper than dealing with regulations + politically inflated grid prices.
In most states, the power company cannot seize your home for cancelling your account + not paying your bill. Also, in most states, the power company gets to regulate the design of grid-attached solar. They're artificially driving installation costs up (building codes do too, and are a separate problem).
This means there's a big step function coming. The price of grids (which are subsidizing the AI data center boondoggle, and also legacy fossil fuel plutocrats) are currently a little higher than grid attached battery + PV. We're maybe one more price halving to the point where it makes sense to go off grid.
At that point, a market for off-grid (non-subsidizing) system installations will materialize. In distorted markets, this will drop prices non-linearly (2-4x), and then everyone will act surprised.
It seems that a project like this would require more cooperation -
https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-one...
But cooperation only occurs when the entire group is at risk, that isn’t the case currently.
Nitpick: if you’re trying to illustrate sizes of things, you should use an equal-area map projection.
The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?
The key point: we can power everything with less than half the land than we have build on or paved over.
I’ll just leave this here for those who have some time to watch: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=MBVdiOpSdgmGaar5
what’s the current, cumulative size of all housing, private home, apartments building roof surface ?
The future is solar. This has been clear for years. Solar simply has too many advantages. Plummetting prices, no moving parts, the only form of direct power generation, it can be done anywhere including otherwise unusable land and flexible installation, everything from a window sill to a giant solar farm in the desert.
And of course China is leading this transformation by miles. They're also discovering a whole bunch of secondary benefits too. For example, you need water to clean the solar panels. In desert areas that combination of shade and water has halted or even rolled back desertification. And in places they're feeding livestock on these plants to control their growth.
Orbital data centers make no sense but you know what does make sense? Orbital solar power collectors. I've seen estimates that because of the essentially 24 hour sunlight, no weather and no atmosphere an orbital solar panel can generate around ~7 times the power of a terrestial panel, even factoring in transmission loss from beaming power to the ground. We will reach a point where launch costs are sufficiently low that this will make economic sense.
We don't just have a generation problem (although we have that too, to a lesser degree). We fundamentally have a storage, transmission and distribution problem.
The system for moving power around is at least as complex and expensive as the systems for generating it. Probably significantly more.
If we don't solve those problems we can build as many solar plants as we want, they're worse than useless unless we can move that power around.
We need massive investments in high voltage transmission and hydroelectric pumped storage before we can utilize significantly more storage. These are not technical problems, but political ones.
I think it's more likely that storage will beat transmission. This will also increase robustness rather than continuing to tie the electricity infrastructure into one massive machine that's vulnerable to attack and Carrington events.
This will be especially true if people keep driving cars.
An EV with 300 mile range has something like 2-4x more batteries than a typical whole-house battery. It's easy to imagine houses will go into "away mode" when there's no car plugged in: The appliances would use as much power as possible to keep the solar from curtailing (imagine heat pump water heaters that go up to 210F then mix down to 120F on the output, freezers that cool way below typical temperatures, or HVAC systems with heat reservoirs). The houses would coast over night.
When the car is plugged in, they'd provision 25% of vehicle range for things like cooking, lighting and heating.
If the above is too expensive, then people would just add more house battery, which would cost less than their car. Either way, storage wins.
Too bad most people don't live close to those specific areas.
Yes!, I totaly agree. The total surface area of the world gets exposed to the sun and that fuels everything!, well except for the leftovers of other suns that exploded and produced the heavy elements, ok, all the elements, mrrrr, most of the elements, but the ones that weuse for nukes. There is nothing but solar energy/fuel availible.The universe is an energy gradient, get you some!
As a domestic p.v. auto-builder: the real point is seasonal storage, until we will (if we will) be able to store energy across a whole year not just day-to-day, we simply can't run on p.v. while p.v. is excellent for self consumption if only we stopped trying to create large-scale solutions instead of solutions for domestic and small sheds self-consumption, which are the only technically viable options, given that large injection power plants are nothing but a problem for the grid...
Having cars integrated with the home (since they are 400V LFP on average, just like domestic storage and CSS is already there) is what works well to reduce summer demand peaks, not by passively injecting power but by helping the grid only when it actually needs it.
The only reason it isn't being done is because the political agenda is to strip the majority of private property, and for this reason, the "new deal" that works technically doesn't work in reality. They are trying to make it work for dense cities and large buildings, some not possible on scale for an unsustainable way of life as well. When the FAKE green supporters finally realize this, they will understand how many decades of evolution we are losing just to play into the hands of a few kleptocrats.
Our cars have a total of 8x the capacity of our home batteries. We're ~ one dongle away from doing what you describe.
The other thing we need to see to really replace grids are panels that are optimized for overcast days. Currently, production drops to 0-10% when it's cloudy, even though the fraction of wattage hitting the panels is way higher than that.
At some point, I think we'll end up with panels that produce linearly to the amount of light (this is probably hard), or that are high efficiency in winter / high altitudes, but low efficiency at peak (this is probably easy).
Currently, panels are marketed on wattage under full sunlight at high temperatures. This is important for air conditioning use cases, but the grid is overproducing on those days already and we'd curtail if we took them off grid.
Same for me, I made a choice back then, and only realized it was a mistake in hindsight, to set up a small storage system, thinking it would just serve as a backup for blackouts. Since those have mostly been very short so far (a few seconds or minutes), I went with 8kWh, while the car has 74...
Today I'm expanding it, aiming for 38kWh, which is still much less than the car. Even though the price of LFP batteries has dropped significantly, it hasn't fallen enough, nor has the cost of grid power risen enough, to justify aiming for 100kWh to have substantial autonomy for most of the year, including heating.
Using the car as part of the system would be fantastic, and the technology is all there to make it happen, except for the will of manufacturers and the political drive to go in that direction. It's not happening because they don't want people to be self-sufficient; they want large power plants, not semi-autonomous homes and warehouses. But the fact is, economically and technically, the former makes no sense, while the latter does.
Many of the resources consumed to make electricity at the scale we are talking replacing the production of those resources create the other resources used to for various other things
e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc
There is a balance of these.
This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning
The linked article does take into account all those other uses of energy.
it only loosely takes into account the total BTU of energy produced not all the byproducts and equipment that needs energy to be replaced. 5 million homes heat with heating oil 70 million homes heat with NG. 26 million tons of bitumen for asphalt roads You can assume 13 million tons of shingles going to the dump each year are replaced with shingles using again bitumen. ~10% of fossil fuels consumed per year go to making plastics
Again when you refine or produce OIL you don't just get one or the other. Most of the power generation in Mexico (over 50%) is literally just the waste NG from producing oil from the shale in western USA. (We were previously just burning this off at the wells btw)
The total energy used includes all the energy used in those "byproducts and equipment", so I don't understand your argument. What, you think the natural gas that goes into plastic production isn't being counted?
A significant overcount would be confusing primary energy with work. A joule of electrical energy can replace more than a joule of primary energy.