Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)
landartgenerator.org
landartgenerator.org
They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.
And, I think we should heavily tax data centers federally because they're electricity, water, and land extractive and sound pollution vampires hostile to communities they invade (often to the chagrin of locals because of NDA backroom deals with corrupt politicians).. they're tantamount to giant petrochem facilities in "sacrifice zones". The rich people can cry about leaving, as did FDR's friends did, but it's always an empty threat.
Let alone the likes of Nestlé's water stealing and golf courses in hot, dry climates.
Happy to be proven wrong by someone who has the numbers. For now like what this comment section is about with "the space needed for solar is nothing compared to what we're already doing", it seems like the water needed for data centers is nothing compared to how much we're already throwing away.
Thinking about it now, i have one more stupid idea, people have no faith in government, perhaps it is possible to contract a private insurance company. They can get paid to keep an eye on our bureaucrats. Make it a contract with teeth.
You just need ultra high voltage transition lines and a grid that can real-time redistribute load + generation.
Ultra high voltage towers are all over Texas. If they can make them work there (with the extreme heat, tornados and absurdly long distances involved in that state), they can work most places.
It's really China with none of the upsides and all of the downsides.
We know it is but with all the hysteria we have very little experience growing and processing it with modern equip. You should want to harvest seeds, fibers, make ethanol from biomass, and perhaps do biochar, concrete, textile, plastics etc etc
The hysteria is rather fascinating, I recently learn how the inquisition got rid of Amaranth.
If only we could figure out how to do something with water hyacinth. No one has ever complaint about not having enough yield of that. It grows preposterously.
We pretend the crop to be a huge problem, much like the giant lakes of poop we produce. Most of the energy in food comes out on the other end.
Under ideal conditions its mass can double in five days!
https://weeds.dpi.nsw.gov.au/Weeds/WaterHyacinth
Water hyacinth smothers the surface of waterways, dams, irrigation channels and drains.
It can rapidly take over an entire waterway and under favourable conditions it can double its mass every 5 days.
It reduces water levels, reduces water quality, causes changes in water temperature and pH, lowers oxygen levels, reduces the amount of sunlight under the water.
The large infestations of water hyacinth impact negatively on agriculture and infrastructure by blocking irrigation channels and equipment reducing the quality of drinking water for livestock in restricting livestock access to water damaging pastures and crops when masses of the plant settle in a paddock after floods damaging fences during floods blocking roads, bridges and culverts when masses of the plant become mobile during floods.
Water hyacinth also has negative impacts on people and the environment because it: restricts birds and other native animals’ access to water, prevents native water plants from growing, limits movement of aquatic animals reduces food and shelter for fish and other native animals provides favourable conditions for mosquitoes to breed prevents boating and water sports reduces the visual appeal of waterways.
The NSW Herbarium currently uses the scientific name: Pontederia crassipes for water hyacinth.
What does it look like? Water hyacinth is a floating water plant. In cool areas, the leaves die off during frosts but the crowns survive and regrow the following spring.
Cows will eat it too, it can be 15-30% of the feedstock.
It's a measure of efficiency.
To get one Joule out of corn ethanol, the US is burning more than one Joule of oil. This is probably the main reason corn subsidies are so popular politically. They serve the oil barons, mega farms, and big agriculture firms like Monsanto.
On top of that, modern farming practices degrade topsoil over time. It's gotten a bit better than the Dust Bowl days, but we're still burning through topsoil at crazy rates, and it is beyond current technology to manufacture new topsoil.
So, ethanol corn is like heating your house by dumping gas on a field and burning it to boil water. Then you carry the water inside. There only difference is the number of levels of indirection.
The last I checked, it took less energy to make a solar panel than the expected lifetime output of the panel. So, at least you can power solar factories (in theory) with solar. There's still the problem of the environmental impact of rare earth refining, but at least it's a second order issue, and not like the first order issues corn ethanol has.
(Note that not all ethanol farming is as dumb as what the US does: For example, Brazil has had a net positive energy industry from sugar ethanol for a while. They "just" have to clear cut the rain forest to replace the farmland that house of cards is destroying.)
An order of magnitude less.
While each solar panel is a small step towards more and better electrification
Or about 30 million acres if you’re in to that sort of thing.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
A rabbit hole I started working down was how much ammonia would cost is the hydrogen was from electrolysis power by solar. It's sort of competitive.
Whack bit. 2200 calories a day is 2.5kwh. That's what a 400W solar panel puts out.
Which made me wonder about just synthesizing amino acids directly. Why make ammonia and spray it in crops that use sunlight (2% efficient) to turn it into protein.
You start digging an there are two dozen companies working the bioreactor angle. Hydrogen + N2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
I find this way more interesting than using AI to replace MBA's and code monkeys.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/food-without-agricultu...
Also I think I read in a book on aeronautics which was published in the 1950's that more energy is required from oil to grow food than the food itself. Trying to look that up again just now the internet spits out an efficiency as low as 10%.
> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.
To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.
Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.
Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
If we normalize by $ instead of by acre, the hypothetical golf course conversion would produce >> 10% of land requirements.
An acre used to make hay might bring in $500/year.
An acre used for PV might bring in $25,000/year.
If PV uses too much land, do we want to talk about what agriculture is doing?
If we’ve worried about land why not go for nuclear? Just plant nuclear reactor seeds add fertilizer and power plants spring up in a few months.
See it doesn’t quite work that way. It brushes away too many variables.
Have you noticed the price of beef going up? It's because we're losing arable land to climate change. It takes a large number of high quality acres to raise a cow on grass.
That's been getting less and less feasible over time between extreme weather and erosion, so the cows get hay instead.
Hay production in places like Texas is disrupted by drought every few years, which means that ranchers have to sell their cattle at a loss or let the cows starve in the fields (assuming they don't die of heat stroke - the cows and the farmers).
After a few bad cycles like that, the ranchers start selling off land, so there aren't enough cows even in good years. Presumably this is bad for hay farmers, since demand attenuates down to what it would be in a drought year.
That brings us to 2026. It's pretty clear what's coming next.
Appropriate regulations and enforcement is what is missing but ⅔ of country is brainwashed by billionaires and Fox News that "gubberment bad" and "regulations are communism".
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-approval-ratin... https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slip...
Assuming we're even a semblance of a democracy in 2028, the US is about to see its biggest course correction since the New Deal.
I think this will include a return to a free market economy.
If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies, an army of independent prosecutors, armed with the power of federalization, reorganization and secondary public offerings of reformed criminal enterprises. The "good guys" companies would only be subject to monopoly busting; their investors would not take as big of a bath.
The crazy thing is that, as I get older, I've found I've gone from the hot-head to the voice of reason in conversations like this.
> If I got to decide what that would look like, it'd involve a combination of claw-back of corrupt subsidies
I'm sure you're aware that the overwhelming majority of these go to agriculture. If you genuinely think whoever gets elected will be running on stopping those, that's blindly optimistic.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.
Who cares?
No one pays the wholesale price.
What price does the retail customer pay?
Here the wholesale prices are far more relevant economically.
Still, what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
If politics is a significant cost factor, no amount of technology is going to fix that.
Or, as Jimmy Carr put it: But you go, yeah, you can have net zero, as long as you don't give a fuck about poor people, right? If you don't give a fuck about poor people, of course we can do net zero. - https://youtu.be/H3FwqPkPSHE
I care less about poor people in poor countries in far away lands, and far away times, than I do my fellow citizens in my relatively wealthy country.
And my fellow citizens, especially the low income folk, are affected everyday by high energy costs. High energy costs result in higher costs of everything.
Whereas the effects of climate change, to the extent that they’re distinguishable from extreme weather events at all, are largely tolerated by even the poorest here in Australia.
High energy costs makes extreme weather events less tolerable.
Where is this the case?
There is what? Approximately nowhere with high renewables penetration and cheap retail energy prices.
Australia has so much coal and gas we could have electricity plans similar to data plans: all you can reasonably consume for $80 a month, and it would still make approximately zero difference to global anthropogenic carbon emissions.
We’re plenty happy for everyone else to burn our LNG and coal. Our LNG is cheap the Japanese even resell it a profit.[1]
Instead, we have high renewables penetration and electricity prices that have increased at a rate three times higher than general inflation.
1. https://ieefa.org/resources/how-japan-cashes-resales-austral...
Do you accept I am an Australian resident retail customer telling you I am not seeing any change in my $/kWh price, nor any offers from my any providers offering lower prices and higher solar input price than the plan I’m on now.
It doesn’t matter if wholesale prices are zero unless energy retailers are willing to compete to drive prices lower.
And they’re not. It’s a regulated market here in Australia.
They’re not really adding value in the same way a farm & associated agribusiness > harvest > global storage and distribution > mill > commercial scale bakery > distribution > retail outlet does.
This reminds me of an amusing comment I read or heard the other day: eggs are now more expensive than chickens. Somethings not right there. And it’s mostly higher costs of energy, and extremely stupid egg production regulations.
Australia could be a manufacturing powerhouse off the back of very steeply subsidised energy. China does it.
But instead we seem to be bent on whatever the fuck this is supped to be?
Energy so expensive ya can’t use it.
Or you could do the same with Solar and have more money left over. Having a subsidy rarely works out well, but subsidizing an inefficient system is making two different mistakes.
> what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
The underlying economics means someone is always paying for that, you can pay for more expensive fossil fuels in your taxes or on your electric bill but it’s going to happen either way.
Granted we have a legacy of fossil fuel, nuclear, and yes early renewable projects but if you have zero subsidies of any kind going forward we get to a 100% emissions free grid because today that’s the cheapest option,
Burning fossil fuels has had an over a century of technical development and global scale it isn’t getting dramatically better to catch up it just loses and renewables just keep getting more appealing over time.
"If you don't give a fuck about [extracting revenue from poor serfs], of course we can do net zero."
If we lived in a more just society, we'd mandate community net metering: This is the idea that (say) a city block can build a solar/wind farm anywhere within a few dozen miles of itself, and then have their bills proportionally reduced by the amount of power that farm produces.
It enables interesting economic models, like "the community takes out a 30 year mortgage to build + maintain the farm in exchange for an immediate halving of their electricity bills", or having trade schools offer free/cheap electrician programs that include apprenticeships building such farms. (See also: Habitat for Humanity.)
Only big industrial users do, and even the largest industrial users I’ve worked for, or adjacent to, in my state don’t come close to amount of electricity used by the aluminium smelter.
Fossil fuels are now less than 30% of electricity generation.
Alas, there's a ton more burning which is not electricity, but progress is undeniable
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...
And of course China is leading this transformation by miles. They're also discovering a whole bunch of secondary benefits too. For example, you need water to clean the solar panels. In desert areas that combination of shade and water has halted or even rolled back desertification. And in places they're feeding livestock on these plants to control their growth.
Orbital data centers make no sense but you know what does make sense? Orbital solar power collectors. I've seen estimates that because of the essentially 24 hour sunlight, no weather and no atmosphere an orbital solar panel can generate around ~7 times the power of a terrestial panel, even factoring in transmission loss from beaming power to the ground. We will reach a point where launch costs are sufficiently low that this will make economic sense.
In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...
And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...
This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.
See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
How do domestic battery installations help with the retail price of electricity?
They lose some solar generation during the day that is now going into charging the batteries, but they have too much of that already.
Net result a lower proportion of (more expensive) fossil fuels in the overall mix, meaning total cost of power generation comes down, and retail prices come down.
In most states, the power company cannot seize your home for cancelling your account + not paying your bill. Also, in most states, the power company gets to regulate the design of grid-attached solar. They're artificially driving installation costs up (building codes do too, and are a separate problem).
This means there's a big step function coming. The price of grids (which are subsidizing the AI data center boondoggle, and also legacy fossil fuel plutocrats) are currently a little higher than grid attached battery + PV. We're maybe one more price halving to the point where it makes sense to go off grid.
At that point, a market for off-grid (non-subsidizing) system installations will materialize. In distorted markets, this will drop prices non-linearly (2-4x), and then everyone will act surprised.
1. Time arbitrage of energy. Store energy from times when it is abundant, and put it back when it's more scarce. This is profitable on most grids with at least high single digits of percentage of renewable generation. And to say it's profitable for battery operators is the same thing as saying it's reducing costs, if the grid/utility is operated in a fair way.
2. Location arbitrage of electricity by making use of times with less grid congestion. The grid itself is the only location arbitrage we have had up until grid-sized batteries. But it's expensive, and the costs are not even. Some locations are far cheaper to service than others. Battery storage has long been a "non-wired alternative" that in many cases is cheaper than stringing wires to expand capacity.
There's probably more that I dont understand. Battery storage on the grid is a disruptive technology, because up until now the grid was pretty much the only major system I could think of that doesn't have any storage. (Computer networking is kind of similar, but buffers have always existed. It just turns out that buffering is not tremendously useful in the network itself when the endpoints have tons of storage...)
In the US, transmitting and distributing electricity is more expensive than generating it. That imbalance is going to widen far further as solar and wind get cheaper, which they will for a minimum of a decade, based on the current pace. They could get cheaper for multiple decades. We don't really know what the floor is going to be, but we do know it will be electricity far cheaper than we had imagined from any other technology up until now.
Having cars integrated with the home (since they are 400V LFP on average, just like domestic storage and CSS is already there) is what works well to reduce summer demand peaks, not by passively injecting power but by helping the grid only when it actually needs it.
The only reason it isn't being done is because the political agenda is to strip the majority of private property, and for this reason, the "new deal" that works technically doesn't work in reality. They are trying to make it work for dense cities and large buildings, some not possible on scale for an unsustainable way of life as well. When the FAKE green supporters finally realize this, they will understand how many decades of evolution we are losing just to play into the hands of a few kleptocrats.
The other thing we need to see to really replace grids are panels that are optimized for overcast days. Currently, production drops to 0-10% when it's cloudy, even though the fraction of wattage hitting the panels is way higher than that.
At some point, I think we'll end up with panels that produce linearly to the amount of light (this is probably hard), or that are high efficiency in winter / high altitudes, but low efficiency at peak (this is probably easy).
Currently, panels are marketed on wattage under full sunlight at high temperatures. This is important for air conditioning use cases, but the grid is overproducing on those days already and we'd curtail if we took them off grid.
Today I'm expanding it, aiming for 38kWh, which is still much less than the car. Even though the price of LFP batteries has dropped significantly, it hasn't fallen enough, nor has the cost of grid power risen enough, to justify aiming for 100kWh to have substantial autonomy for most of the year, including heating.
Using the car as part of the system would be fantastic, and the technology is all there to make it happen, except for the will of manufacturers and the political drive to go in that direction. It's not happening because they don't want people to be self-sufficient; they want large power plants, not semi-autonomous homes and warehouses. But the fact is, economically and technically, the former makes no sense, while the latter does.
With solar I doubt we will see costs well under, say, a half cent per kWh. Even when the land and panels are ~free, the surface area of that much aluminum/glass/wiring/infrastructure has a cost. And a half cent is cheap, but not too cheap to meter. You could get a barrel of oil in the late 1800s for ~$20 of today's money, roughly 1 cent/kWh of thermal energy or 3 cents if you run it in today's plants to make electricity. The idea that a _time machine to the 1800s_ would be a cost-effective way to obtain energy is patently absurd and I suspect the man with a handlebar mustache who would sell you the energy would think it similarly absurd; it certainly isn't true for any other serious industrial input. But energy is unique.
At 0.5 cents you're not going to scale global energy use by orders of magnitude. And if you want any of the various promised sci-fi scenarios (flying cars, large scale high speed travel, scaled up space travel, true recycling) you need orders of magnitude more energy.
Don't get me wrong, solar is a great solution for today. But I don't think it's the solution for the future that many people dream of.
No, the real question is, where the hell is this exponential increase coming from? I think anyone would agree that, along most obvious metrics, the difference between 1800 and 1945 is much more pronounced than between 1945 and 2020. Yet the first was a 4x increase, and the second, over 7x. And in a third the time, too.
I'd like to see it broken down by country. I'll bet a lot of the increase actually comes from very poor countries turning into rich ones. In the west, our at-home per-capita energy use has not changed much from 1945 - may even have declined for some demographics (1945 houses were poorly insulated). But China lifted some hundreds of millions of peasant farmers into a middle class existence. That's got to be a bigger factor than the fact that I own a laptop and my grandpa didn't.
That's an interesting perspective, thank you.
As far as country breakdowns, a decent start is (as usual) Our World in Data. And indeed, as you expected, the increase in energy use is mainly from Asia. I think things are a bit more complex, though; most of China's energy use is in manufacturing. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
To your question, why do we need energy too cheap to meter? Well... because there are a lot of sci-fi scenarios that would need it. Any of (high speed travel / flying cars / space travel) at a large scale would use an unimaginable amount of energy. Plenty of ideas to protect the environment - true recycling, cleaning the oceans, truly cleaning wastewater from all the pollutants we put in it, et cetera all require far cheaper electricity. And the thing is that in most future-planning scenarios, if you need cheaper X, just wait. Most things get much cheaper over time! Not energy! If we want cheaper energy, we need to do something serious towards it, such as fusion - at least, I'm not aware of any realistic proposals to generate energy too-cheap-to-meter aside from fusion.
https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-one...
But cooperation only occurs when the entire group is at risk, that isn’t the case currently.
The system for moving power around is at least as complex and expensive as the systems for generating it. Probably significantly more.
If we don't solve those problems we can build as many solar plants as we want, they're worse than useless unless we can move that power around.
We need massive investments in high voltage transmission and hydroelectric pumped storage before we can utilize significantly more storage. These are not technical problems, but political ones.
An EV with 300 mile range has something like 2-4x more batteries than a typical whole-house battery. It's easy to imagine houses will go into "away mode" when there's no car plugged in: The appliances would use as much power as possible to keep the solar from curtailing (imagine heat pump water heaters that go up to 210F then mix down to 120F on the output, freezers that cool way below typical temperatures, or HVAC systems with heat reservoirs). The houses would coast over night.
When the car is plugged in, they'd provision 25% of vehicle range for things like cooking, lighting and heating.
If the above is too expensive, then people would just add more house battery, which would cost less than their car. Either way, storage wins.
I will once again point to Standard Thermal as something whose technology would enable this switch, especially if they can deliver PV-resistive seasonally stored 600 C heat at a cost similar to that of heat from combustion of Henry Hub natural gas.
The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?
e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc
There is a balance of these.
This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning
Again when you refine or produce OIL you don't just get one or the other. Most of the power generation in Mexico (over 50%) is literally just the waste NG from producing oil from the shale in western USA. (We were previously just burning this off at the wells btw)
A significant overcount would be confusing primary energy with work. A joule of electrical energy can replace more than a joule of primary energy.