Alright, so I'm off by how many orders of magnitude then? 4? Or 20? If I'm off by 3 or 4, whatever the reason, my previous comment applies, and the amount of energy you need is still off by orders of magnitude! So how many am I wrong by?
wind power takes up surface area too. In fact, wind is just solar energy. The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law and necessarily requires environmental destruction.
Doesn't matter at all because, as I pointed out, the whole approach is ridiculously wrong-headed. We know how much energy we actually need, and it has nothing to do with how much is in the ground and how it got there.
> wind power takes up surface area too.
However, that can even be the same surface area you've already put solar panels on.
> The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law
This is correct. But the cap is at about 26000 TW (see https://medium.com/earth-47/how-much-energy-does-the-earth-r...) and the amount we need is about 300 TW, so if we manage to capture only about 0.12% of the available energy, all our needs are already met.
> and necessarily requires environmental destruction.
Sure. But not even remotely close to the degree you're claiming.
Where do we get this 300TW number from? Does this include heating in winter, cooling in summer, fuel for moving goods and people in cars, trains, ships, airplanes, agriculture future energy consumption, and the energy needed to remove CO2 that has been created as per the proposal in the article at the top of this thread?
So the sun shone, for a billion years, to keep it simple, 26000 TW per year, and the photosynthesis on the surface of the ocean only saved what, projected oil reserves another 100 years, 60k TW at best? That puts photosyntheses of the ocean surface chloroplasts converted into oil at 0.0000001% efficiency. Either that or there's triple digits orders of magnitude more oil under the surface we don't know about. You believe that?
And suppose that is true. That would mean the amount of carbon coming from it is absolutely miniscule. Think of the number of tons of carbon dioxide that could've been in the atmosphere when the photosynthesis started, subtract out what would've been locked up to store this miniscule amount of energy, that's what you get, hardly anything. We know that's not true, so we can safely guess that the energy from photosynthesis that was stored was significantly more efficient than 0.0000001%, if it weren't you wouldn't have a climate crisis, which means humans use much more than 300TW. And that's just currently.
Wherever you're getting these consumption numbers from, they're just simply not possible. The carbon that has been produced in the last 100 years outweighs the amount that would be released from oil during that time if it were constant 300TW yearly, let alone with the comparatively small amount 100 years ago.
wind power takes up surface area too. In fact, wind is just solar energy. The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law and necessarily requires environmental destruction.