Comment by harrall
7 hours ago
In 1800, humanity generated 0.3 terrawatts (TW).
Humankind generates 20 TW today. That’s a massive jump.
And everyone wants more power. It determines what society can do.
But 20 TW is a pittance in the grand scheme of the vast universe. Imagine if we were generating 100 TW or 1,000 TW.
That’s why we talk about stuff like the Kardashev Scale — type 1, 2, 3 civilization type stuff.
Electricity is not currently cheap. 20 TW is a pittance. One day humanity will reach a point where we’re generating 500 TW of power and questions of being able to smelt aluminum or make drinking water from brine seem almost like a joke. We will have flying construction drones 24/7 at that scale of energy production. At that point, we’ll be asking questions like “when will we have enough energy to terraform a planet?”
Of course, there are side effects of greater power generation such as global warming… but once again, it’s a scale thing. The universe is vast.
Slowly, we are getting there.
Where does that 0.3 TW figure come from? That seems awfully high.
is that a sustained 20TW? Absolutely crazy that we're generating 60kwh per person daily. Where does it all go?
Lots of it is lost to heat with legacy fossil generation.
You have pretty much the same heat losses with nuclear, or anything else where you heat water to turn a turbine.
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To note, we are almost at installing 1TW of solar PV every year globally.