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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

There's no way solar can grow geometrically for long. It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow. Land is limited; sunlight is limited. It has a hard, hard limit.

Unlike many other kinds of power generation, which are land-frugal and work 24 hours a day.

So, let's rethink who doesn't understand growth.

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> It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow.

Now you're really showing you haven't bothered to do basic arithmetic. Land use is not any sort of real limit to PV solar, especially in the US.

I suggest you check your assertions for validity before you commit them to writing.

Looking it up solar/renewables take up surprisingly less space than expected

Area required for all renewables: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

Area required for just solar: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

Luckily we'll have more than enough energy long, long before we run out of land or sunlight. We could satisfy a large part of our energy demand just by replacing energy crops by solar panels, with the added benefit of not needing fertilizer and pesticides.

If you are concerned about solar's use of land then you must be positively apoplectic about using corn for ethanol. That uses more than 40% of US corn production, an amount of acreage so vast it's difficult to comprehend.

Using PV with BEVs instead of ethanol in ICEs would be something like 200x more land efficient.

~40 million acres.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

California has a lot of desert. A lot a lot.

The single most fragile ecosystem in the world is a desert. The casual way folks here throw that line out, again and again - shows a profound lack of understanding about what an ecosystem is.

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