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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

  Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.

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The heat and electricity energy storage need to grow to 46000 TWh [1]. The current value is about 10 TWh.

[1] https://uk.eragroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Global_sy...

Heat storage is quite cheap per kWh and has excellent economy of scale.

Just a note that 46,000 is a 2050 target - which covers current demand AND all the growth in electricity and heat demand over the next 25 years.

That's in line with estimates being bandied about in the Finnish dissertations.

Addendum: please don't downvote @red75prime for bringing a fact to a fact based discussion.

Yes, that does not really answer my question, though. A global average is somewhat interesting but with solar the situation is bound to vary widly by location. Also, does 'solar' then include battery storage?

Australia isn't Norway, there are variations in land area, latitude coverage, existing legacy infrastructure, etc. - I'm not writing a country by country break down for you - the IEA has pages per major countries that show progress and plans.

Solar includes energy storage - be that thermal, battery, hydro, etc.

Areas where solar is much less productive (e.g. Norway, Canada) tend to have lower population density, more abundant hydropower potential (which also means storage capacity) and more wind potential.

So, the ratio of solar, wind and hydro would be different under a 100% green energy scenario for them.

They often have grid interconnects to countries where solar does produce a lot, too.

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