alt Hacker NewsThe world's total energy consumption (most of which is fossil fuels) is currently estimated at 620 exajoules, or 17TWh / year.
Assuming zero growth in energy consumption (hello AI), extracting even half of that seems like it would be consequential.
Replies
dbeardsl • yesterday at 7:27 PM
I believe this is off by 5 or 6 orders of magnitude.
Looks like it's more like 200,000Twh / Yr
10 TW * 1 year = 8,760 TWh / year. The current rate of energy production is ~42TW and slowly dropping over billions of years, so even after efficiency losses gathering 1% of what’s produced is several times current energy consumption.