One of many cases where it’s much easier to predict the long-term trajectory than the path to get there, and most people still don’t.
I like to put the numbers in a form that less mathy folks seem to find intuitive. If you wanted to replace all of the world’s current primary energy use with current solar panels, and had enough storage to make it all work, then the land area you’d need is approximately South Korea. Huge, but also not really that big. (Note: current global solar panel manufacturing capacity is enough to get us about a half to a third of the way there if we fully utilize it over the next 25 years).
In practice I think over the next handful of decades we’re going to need 3-10x that much electricity, but even that doesn’t really change the conclusion, just the path. But also, we can plausibly expect solar panel efficiencies and capacity factors to go up as we start moving towards better types of PV tech. For example, based on already demonstrated performance values, a 2 or 3 junction tandem bifacial perovskite solar panel (which no one currently manufactures at scale, and which seemed implausible to most people including me even two years ago) could get you close to double the current kWh/m2 we get from silicon, and the power would be spread much less unevenly throughout the day and year.
One of many cases where it’s much easier to predict the long-term trajectory than the path to get there, and most people still don’t.
I like to put the numbers in a form that less mathy folks seem to find intuitive. If you wanted to replace all of the world’s current primary energy use with current solar panels, and had enough storage to make it all work, then the land area you’d need is approximately South Korea. Huge, but also not really that big. (Note: current global solar panel manufacturing capacity is enough to get us about a half to a third of the way there if we fully utilize it over the next 25 years).
In practice I think over the next handful of decades we’re going to need 3-10x that much electricity, but even that doesn’t really change the conclusion, just the path. But also, we can plausibly expect solar panel efficiencies and capacity factors to go up as we start moving towards better types of PV tech. For example, based on already demonstrated performance values, a 2 or 3 junction tandem bifacial perovskite solar panel (which no one currently manufactures at scale, and which seemed implausible to most people including me even two years ago) could get you close to double the current kWh/m2 we get from silicon, and the power would be spread much less unevenly throughout the day and year.