Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)

The square km the US uses to grow corn for ethanol is about ~~ 1/3rd the total global area required for solar in this article. Ethanol that is a gigantic waste of resources.

They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.

A long article, about rising prices driven by fossil fuel costs but also a lot of positivity as you read towards the end and a sudden sharp downturn that’s coming to Australias power prices. Australia’s wholesale power prices halved in q4 2025 due to massive solar and battery investment that on a per capita basis dwarfs china. Australia is now over 50% renewables. It’s set to accelerate too.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...

So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.

I felt this was telling:

> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.

To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.

The key point: we can power everything with less than half the land than we have build on or paved over.

There’s an updated article as of Aug 2021 too: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

It seems that a project like this would require more cooperation -

https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-one...

But cooperation only occurs when the entire group is at risk, that isn’t the case currently.

The biggest impediment to clean energy, which is actually cheaper than fossil fuels, is politics. We have political interference at the highest level to impede solar, storage, and wind.

In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian

This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...

And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.

And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...

This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.

Many of the resources consumed to make electricity at the scale we are talking replacing the production of those resources create the other resources used to for various other things

e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc

There is a balance of these.

This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning

I’ll just leave this here for those who have some time to watch: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=MBVdiOpSdgmGaar5

Nitpick: if you’re trying to illustrate sizes of things, you should use an equal-area map projection.

The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?

Too bad most people don't live close to those specific areas.

what’s the current, cumulative size of all housing, private home, apartments building roof surface ?