Only 0.3 percent of the world in the world should be covered with solar collectors to cover all energy requirements
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Solar energy has been on the rise for years and for a good reason. It has become one of the cheapest ways to generate energy almost everywhere, and it is one of the best options for combating climate change.
Nevertheless, it still has its critics. The US Energy Minister Chris Wright claimed that Solar could not deliver the entire energy that the world needs. This is wild and embarrassing how many have highlighted. In fact, solar – including wind that captures the energy of the sun by another mechanism – is the only power source that can satisfy the growing energy requirement without roasting the planet.
On September 2, Wright posted on the Social Media platform X: “Even if you wrapped the entire planet into a solar panel, you would only produce 20% of global energy. One of the biggest mistakes that politicians can make is equality with energy!”
First of all, the electricity is measured in relation to the energy it offers. For practical purposes, you can equate the electricity with energy.
As a climate researcher Gavin Schmidt at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the energy content was 186,000 terawatt hours before using all fuels used worldwide. He said the earth gets 6000 times as much energy every year as that.
In addition, Schmidt said if they take into account the fact that 60 percent of the energy of fossil fuels is lost in useful performance when converting it into useful performance, the earth gets an 18,000 -time as much energy from the sun to satisfy current energy consumption.
Of course, existing solar collectors only capture about 20 percent of solar energy, and they cannot put them anywhere. A report by Carbon Tracker 2021, however, estimated that 0.3 percent of the global land area – yes, only the country – is needed to cover the current energy requirement from solar solar, which is less than the current land expression of the fossil fuel infrastructure. In principle, according to the report, solar and wind could provide more than 100 times the current global energy requirement.
In view of the fact that the current energy requirement with fossil fuels already causes catastrophic global warming, the luck that there are not enough fossil fuels on the planet is to deliver 100 times as much energy. But what about nuclear fusion? Would that be an even better option than solar if it ever gets viable?
The answer is no. Eric Chaisson from Harvard University even estimated that even modest growth of global energy requirements was accepted. In around three centuries, the waste heat could be enough to heat the planet by 3 ° C. We talk about the waste heat generated by the energy generated, which is used when you cook a kettle or use a computer.
In the case of solar, tidal and wave performance, which are effectively a form of solar- waste heat is not a problem, since this energy already ends as a hiking warmth, regardless of whether we use it or not. With other power sources such as nuclear split, the waste heat is not already available.
“[Carl] Sagan preached to me earlier, and I now preach to my students that every intelligent civilization on every planet only has to use the energy of its parent star, ”said Chaisson New scientist 2012.
While three centuries are far away, the waste heat is already regionally. The researchers estimated that the maximum summer temperatures in Europe are 0.4 ° C higher due to waste heat. Around 2100, the annual average temperatures in some industrialized regions could be almost 1 ° C due to waste heat – an effect that is currently not contained in climate models.
The end result is not only solar and wind that can supply the energy that we need for many centuries, but also the only technologies that can do so without causing catastrophic warming. Wright could not be wrong.
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