Comment by IMTDb
1 year ago
> Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].
Enough sunlights lands on earth every two minutes to power humanity if the whole surface of the planet including ocean was fully covered by 100% efficient solar panels. How is this even remotely relevant when we don't have close to the material needed to achieve that coverage and the efficiency of panels is famously extremely low.
The deployment in 2024 is - as usual - expressed in "theoretical max power". Which is nowhere near the actual throughput, and of course orders of magnitude higher than the "when I need it" actually delivery. Again; big numbers don't mean big results; real life scenario matter here, theoretical best is far less relevant.
Additionally, quoting "pv-magazine-usa.com" on this subject must be some kind of silly joke considering that it could as well be named "lobby-webiste-with-a-clear-political-agenda-to-push-for-photovoltaic-and-prove-it-also-cures-cancer.com" and no-one wold bat an eye. Similarly, other HN comment written by yourself usually don't count as "sources" for statements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856518) (solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn). The thought exercise is to demonstrate how cheap renewables are, their growth trajectory, and to guess how soon this impairs all other non renewable generation sources economically speaking. Clearly, the impairment is coming, as this post demonstrates. We’re simply arguing the time horizon.
The links to my other comments are comments that contain citations supporting the thesis, versus an unnecessary wall of text. No facts I put forth are uncited.