There’s plenty of land area for solar. I did a rough calculation once, and my estimate was that it’d take roughly twice the land area of the Benelux to build a solar farm that produced as much energy per annum as the entirety of humanity uses each year (The sun outputs an insane amount of power, and if one steps back to think about it, almost every single joule of energy we’ve used came indirectly through the sun—often through quite inefficient routes). I didn’t take into account day/night cycles, or losses of efficiency due to transmission, but if we assume 4x loss due to nighttime (probably a pessimistic estimate) and 5x loss due to transmission (again, being pessimistic), it still comes out to substantially less than the land we have available to us (About 1⁄3 the size of the Sahara desert)
It would be interesting to see the efficiency of solar + direct air capture compared to plants. If it wins I will have another thing to yell at hippies (before yelling about there not being enough land area even for solar)
There’s plenty of land area for solar. I did a rough calculation once, and my estimate was that it’d take roughly twice the land area of the Benelux to build a solar farm that produced as much energy per annum as the entirety of humanity uses each year (The sun outputs an insane amount of power, and if one steps back to think about it, almost every single joule of energy we’ve used came indirectly through the sun—often through quite inefficient routes). I didn’t take into account day/night cycles, or losses of efficiency due to transmission, but if we assume 4x loss due to nighttime (probably a pessimistic estimate) and 5x loss due to transmission (again, being pessimistic), it still comes out to substantially less than the land we have available to us (About 1⁄3 the size of the Sahara desert)