Solar and wind can meet world energy demand 100 times over

There are a lot of ways to generate lots of power, what we're generally lacking is ways to _store_ power to handle things like peaks.

The world can theoretically meet it, in practice, it is the same situation as the &quot;food&quot; shortage.<p>Solar and food have a distribution problem, not only a generation problem, but since the world decided nationalism, protectionism and populism is more important than cooperation it is not going to get solved and we&#x27;ll have to generate our needs and store it many times over in order for the biggest consumers of energy to be satisfied.<p>Just in time production and energy sharing will remain a dream and we&#x27;ll keep wasting resources and the planet again and again just for our petty grievances.

I worked to help develop and deploy geothermal for a few years. Like most alt energy, it is was never intended to be the single replacement for fossil fuels.<p>But deployed to it&#x27;s strengths - geothermal is yet another valuable component, that can advance the honest goal of marginalizing fossil fuel use.

It feels like within the next 20 years we are going to have a good handle on “green” power to fixed locations. The tricky piece we have left is how do we move people and freight over long distances.<p>EVs can do a decent job of transporting a few people a short distance, but aircraft and long distance freight has a whole other set of issues.<p>Look at container ships, one of the biggest polluters and sources of carbon on the planet. How do you remove the need for massive amounts of diesel on those?<p>How about passenger and air freight? How do we eliminate all the CO2 from jet fuel? In the US we are terrible at infrastructure, but do we invest in a super-train system?<p>This is likely the next big challenge.

&quot;100 times over&quot; is a lot less than I&#x27;d have thought or hoped.<p>We have to cover 1% of the world&#x27;s surface with solar and wind farms to pay for our current energy use? That won&#x27;t be easy.

The next problem to solve is how to continue servicing demand for electricity when the sun goes down (an everyday occurrence) and when the wind stops blowing for extended periods of time. Demand for problem is constant, however the electricity generated from solar and wind is not always so.

Serious question. How do we make enough solar panels and wind turbines that will be capable of producing all of this energy without destroying all of our natural resources&#x2F;habitats?