🖙we could power the world on one Texas' worth of solar panels (not counting infrastructure)
while procrastinating on packing for my tripconscientously browsing the internet to stay informed, i saw that a Trump official claimed that solar was a nonstarter because we'd need more solar panels than there is total land area on the planet.
this is a silly thing to say in the first place. i mean, no one's suggesting we rip up all the other forms of renewable energy. also, many environmentalists are pretty okay with nuclear even if renewables should be what we focus on (more or less the correct opinion imo). i guess maybe he's hoping you'll think all forms of renewable electricity are equally space (in)efficient?
it's also wrong. people pointed out this was wrong because all electricity use could be met by solar panels taking up the land area of Portugal, but the original comment is belligerently but explicitly talking about all energy.
fortunately, a very approximate estimate for all energy is easy to calculate. multiply total energy use by the land use per energy unit1 and you get your answer.
((172 × petawatt) × hour) × ((1 × (meter^2)) / ((0.75 × 365) × kilowatt × hour)) ≈ 242,592.0412 mi²
for the record, this is just under the area of Texas and 628,310.5023 in km². this doesn't account for infrastructure or the fact some solar panels are older or in not-very-favorable areas. it also doesn't account for putting solar panels on roofs or above parking structures or augmenting solar with forms of renewable or carbon-neutral energy that are more space-efficient, like offshore wind or nuclear.
by comparison, about 41 percent of the U.S. is already dedicated to meat, dairy, and egg production, more than 5 Texas' worth. i'm hitting my limit for research for an Alys+ post, but producing the animal products to meet the world's meat, dairy, and egg needs almost certainly requires more land than exists in the entire country.
another way you can see this is obviously wrong is that currently 13 percent of world energy comes from renewables. even if we ignore nuclear (a further 7 percent), that means it would take between a 7 and 8 fold increase to cover all our energy needs. since renewable energy takes up relatively little land right now, it's pretty silly to imagine scaling it up 8 times would literally not fit, particularly when you consider all the land we use for other forms of energy generation. presumably at least some of it could be repurposed.
one much more formal study than me copying and pasting numbers from Wikipedia and random sites into a calculator, showed that within the margin of error, solar uses basically the same amount of land as coal. meanwhile, solar on roofs, gas, and nuclear all use a lot less. the graphic puts wind in its own category, presumably because it depends on how much of the area below the turbine is considered to be "used" by it, but offshore wind is pretty safely in the same range as roof-based solar, gas, and nuclear.
of course, virtually all energy on earth comes from the sun, so any fossil fuels are (very indirectly) solar power. with solar panels, we're getting the solar energy radiated2 every day. with fossil fuels, we're burning solar energy radiated and then trapped in a living organism and then buried a long time ago. this doesn't actually disprove his argument (like he could still be right if solar panels were way less efficient), but it is a bit ironic.
I got the total energy of the planet from this Wikipedia article and the energy per square meter from this post. i did a quick check by comparing it to another blogger's solar numbers (3,800 kWh a year for 26 m^2 of panels), and this is probably geared toward sunnier areas.↩
i think this is the right verb.↩