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Incredible progress on solar power
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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How many gigawatts do we need?
1.21
apparently around 25 terawatt hours is what the entire world uses
probably would want to use more than that though so yeah, a lot
Terrawatt hours (per year, I assume?) is a strange way to express power usage. It's like saying "my girlfriend lives only 60 km/h minutes away" instead of "1 km away".
And the value is equivalent to 2.74 gigawatts of continuous power output. Which is way too low to be right.
But it's what I'm finding online too. It's like nobody understands what the units mean and they only care about relative changes over time.
I did find the statement that "the total global electricity [generation] capacity in 2022 was nearly 8.9 terawatt (TW)", which makes more sense.
So, you're right, but there is kind of a difference. Watts measure energy rate at an instantaneous moment, but watt-hours (or commonly kilowatt hours) measures that rate over a timeframe. Yes you're back to joules, but its because they're specifically relating it back to watts, it ends up a more useful unit to be in kW and kWh instead of J and kW or something like that.
25twh is pre COVID, now it's almost 30twh. But only 18twh is coal/gas/petro. So only 50 years to replace that much with just solar at the current rate.
so one gigawatt its like a thousand days, so we are talking 30 years to replace fossil fuels, unless the rate keeps expanding?
Just watched an interesting video about the efficiency of renewables meaning we’ll need less total capacity to output the same amount of usable energy