I remember reading somewhere that the solar energy reaching earth is more than enough for our use, can someone please quantify this?
Light energy from the sun in one day is equivalent to our total energy consumption in how many days?
February 6th, 2010 by My Efficient Planet Leave a reply »
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The sun releases enough energy every second to power the US for 9 million years
From the Wiki linked below the quote:
The 89 petawatts of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface is plentiful – almost 6,000 times more – compared to the 15 terawatts of average power consumed by humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
[added] Meaning that enough sunlight falls on the earth per day to power the planet for 16.47 years.
A petawatt is 1 quadrillion, or 10 to the 15th power.
A terawatt is 10 to the 12th power of watts, or 1/1,000ths of a petawatt.
World energy consumption is expected to grow quite a bit between now and 2020. Almost 30% by the looks of the graph here:
http://carto.eu.org/article2489.html
Not quite on topic, but interesting (to me,anyways): the total energy production of the sun, radiating in all directions, is said to be “3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion megawatts”..that’s per second. Some of that is reabsorbed by the sun, but the energy flow into space is still staggering.
http://www.nineplanets.org/sol.html
89 PW of solar power fall on the planet’s surface. While it is not plausible to capture all, or even most, of this energy, capturing less than 0.02% would be enough to meet the current energy needs.
89 PW = 89 x10^15 watts
-p x the thickener squared with a little zinc gets you a long way