Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)

https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

by robtherobber • 6 months ago

52 112 6 months ago

hliyan2• 5 months ago

I felt this was telling:

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.

pfdietz14• 5 months ago

Land is cheap, so why not golf courses?

perilunar4• 5 months ago

Not in cities (where most people live) it isn't

chongli• 5 months ago

Markets allocate resources based on supply and demand. Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems. It’s tragedy of the commons every time.

edwcross• 5 months ago

Nice expression, but the book by the same name is fatally flawed in its science.

roenxi• 5 months ago

Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse 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.

dotancohen• 5 months ago

How much money does a golf course bring in yearly? How onerous are the regulations?

How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?

hliyan2• 5 months ago

I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.

burnt-resistor3• 5 months ago

There is no magic hand, only a Tragedy of the Commons and greedy individuals doing whatever. (Federally, there is at present time little-to-no prosecution of fraudsters or tax cheats. Economically, it's basically The Purge.)

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".

hedora10• 5 months ago

For values of ⅔ ~= 40% and rapidly falling.

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.

bawolff• 5 months ago

I don't think its lack of land that is preventing 10% of our energy coming from solar. Do you really believe that without golf courses there, the land would be used for solar instead?

adrianN9• 5 months ago

Lack of land where you’re permitted to build solar is actually a real problem.

Towaway69• 5 months ago

It seems that a project like this would require more cooperation -

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.

dalyons• 5 months ago

The square km the US uses to grow corn for ethanol is about ~~ 1/3rd the total global area required for solar in this article. Ethanol that is a gigantic waste of resources.

They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.

burnt-resistor3• 5 months ago

Yep. 5% of all US land is dedicated to just growing subsidized corn.

nandomrumber9• 5 months ago

Most of that land probably isn’t useful for much else, in a productive economic sense.

mdf2• 5 months ago

Yes, and the corn-based ethanol here is used for "feeding cars" that have combustion engines, i.e. it's already used exactly for energy production. The most recent Technology Connections video[1] quoted some numbers on this. All this land dedicated to disposable energy production could be dedicated to renewable energy production instead.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

nosuchthing• 5 months ago

upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.

marc_g• 5 months ago

Such an unfathomable waste when you put it in the context of “feeding cars”. I really appreciated the way this channel broke down this viewpoint. Made me want to finally get some panels for my balcony.

ytpete2• 5 months ago

Your main point still stands, but aren't both of them renewable? Corn is a renewable resource, thus ethanol derived from it is too. It's just seemingly a much less efficient renewable fuel for powering a car compared to solar.

nandomrumber9• 5 months ago

The USA grows something more like 121,000 square kilometres of corn for ethanol.

Or about 30 million acres if you’re in to that sort of thing.

https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...

stephenr• 5 months ago

Add in concepts like agrivoltaics and that land could still be productive as arable farmland while it also produces clean energy.

Gibbon12• 5 months ago

Solar farms produce 50 times more energy per acre than corn grown for ethanol.

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.

pfdietz14• 5 months ago

The easiest food to synthesize is probably fatty acids. Orca Sciences (the people who incubated Standard Thermal) have had a project on this.

https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/food-without-agricultu...

https://savor.it/

veleek• 5 months ago

There’s an updated article as of Aug 2021 too: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

AnotherGoodName• 5 months ago

A long article, about rising prices driven by fossil fuel costs but also a lot of positivity as you read towards the end and a sudden sharp downturn that’s coming to Australias power prices. Australia’s wholesale power prices halved in q4 2025 due to massive solar and battery investment that on a per capita basis dwarfs china. Australia is now over 50% renewables. It’s set to accelerate too.

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.

nandomrumber9• 5 months ago

wholesale power prices halved

Who cares?

No one pays the wholesale price.

What price does the retail customer pay?

Retric3• 5 months ago

Retail prices obscure the underlying economics via taxes and subsidies.

Here the wholesale prices are far more relevant economically.

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

Green isn't supposed to save people money. It's just a shift from bit oil to big green if you're interested in the money part.

adrianN9• 5 months ago

The more power you consume the closer to wholesale is your price. I’m sure Aluminium smelters or fertilizer plants care a lot about wholesale prices.

riffraff2• 5 months ago

The EU had wind + solar overtake fossil fuels last year too.

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...

hedora10• 5 months ago

The US did too, despite Trump trying to block it.

epistasis2• 5 months ago

The biggest impediment to clean energy, which is actually cheaper than fossil fuels, is politics. We have political interference at the highest level to impede solar, storage, and wind.

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.

perilunar4• 5 months ago

In Australia we have so much solar that wholesale electricity prices are often negative during the day. Despite that we still have high retail prices. Domestic battery installations are getting popular and will help.

See: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...

nandomrumber9• 5 months ago

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.

How do domestic battery installations help with the retail price of electricity?

janesvilleseo• 5 months ago

I’ll just leave this here for those who have some time to watch: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=MBVdiOpSdgmGaar5

plun9• 5 months ago

Too bad most people don't live close to those specific areas.

biggerben• 5 months ago

Nitpick: if you’re trying to illustrate sizes of things, you should use an equal-area map projection.

The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?

131hn• 5 months ago

what’s the current, cumulative size of all housing, private home, apartments building roof surface ?

swolios2• 5 months ago

Many of the resources consumed to make electricity at the scale we are talking replacing the production of those resources create the other resources used to for various other things

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

pfdietz14• 5 months ago

The linked article does take into account all those other uses of energy.

swolios2• 5 months ago

it only loosely takes into account the total BTU of energy produced not all the byproducts and equipment that needs energy to be replaced. 5 million homes heat with heating oil 70 million homes heat with NG. 26 million tons of bitumen for asphalt roads You can assume 13 million tons of shingles going to the dump each year are replaced with shingles using again bitumen. ~10% of fossil fuels consumed per year go to making plastics

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)

perilunar4• 5 months ago

The key point: we can power everything with less than half the land than we have build on or paved over.

jmyeet• 5 months ago

The future is solar. This has been clear for years. Solar simply has too many advantages. Plummetting prices, no moving parts, the only form of direct power generation, it can be done anywhere including otherwise unusable land and flexible installation, everything from a window sill to a giant solar farm in the desert.

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.

kkfx2• 5 months ago

As a domestic p.v. auto-builder: the real point is seasonal storage, until we will (if we will) be able to store energy across a whole year not just day-to-day, we simply can't run on p.v. while p.v. is excellent for self consumption if only we stopped trying to create large-scale solutions instead of solutions for domestic and small sheds self-consumption, which are the only technically viable options, given that large injection power plants are nothing but a problem for the grid...

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.

hedora10• 5 months ago

Our cars have a total of 8x the capacity of our home batteries. We're ~ one dongle away from doing what you describe.

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.

kkfx2• 5 months ago

Same for me, I made a choice back then, and only realized it was a mistake in hindsight, to set up a small storage system, thinking it would just serve as a backup for blackouts. Since those have mostly been very short so far (a few seconds or minutes), I went with 8kWh, while the car has 74...

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.

metalman• 5 months ago

Yes!, I totaly agree. The total surface area of the world gets exposed to the sun and that fuels everything!, well except for the leftovers of other suns that exploded and produced the heavy elements, ok, all the elements, mrrrr, most of the elements, but the ones that weuse for nukes. There is nothing but solar energy/fuel availible.The universe is an energy gradient, get you some!

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

We don't just have a generation problem (although we have that too, to a lesser degree). We fundamentally have a storage, transmission and distribution problem.

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.

pfdietz14• 5 months ago

I think it's more likely that storage will beat transmission. This will also increase robustness rather than continuing to tie the electricity infrastructure into one massive machine that's vulnerable to attack and Carrington events.

hedora10• 5 months ago

This will be especially true if people keep driving cars.

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.

owenversteeg2• 5 months ago

The land use issue is the main reason why we still need moonshot research into things like fusion. As a species we have always been limited by the cost of energy. I was shocked when I learned that world energy consumption was ~13 exajoules in 1800, ~18 in 1820, ~75 in 1945, and ~550 in 2020. Energy consumption from the Founding Fathers to WW2 only rose by a factor of four!? We went from horses - 1800 was before the first steam train - to supersonic flight with only six times the energy!? And today, in the time of the hyperscalers, we use only 30x the energy of 200 years ago!

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.

dTal• 5 months ago

I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying nukes, why should there be orders of magnitude between today and [insert scifi]?

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.

owenversteeg2• 5 months ago

I have the opposite reaction to your historical energy figures - energy consumption is clearly not as important to technological progress as we imagine. If there's only a 4x difference between the Founding Fathers and B29s carrying nukes, why should there be orders of magnitude between today and [insert scifi]?

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.

Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)

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