89,000 Terawatts

of solar energy pass through our atmosphere and reach the Earth's surface at any moment (one terawatt equals 1,000,000,000,000 watts) .

370 - number of terawatts available from wind power.

15 - That's our current energy consumption in terawatts. Almost 6,000 times less than what is available from the sun and wind. That's not even counting ocean power, geothermal and hydro power. And don't forget the massive amount of efficiency gains we've seen in just the last year.

If those numbers aren't that clear maybe the image is, the sun reigns down more energy every second than we could even imagine using. This is why I'm such a big proponent of solar energy, it is a neverending source of power. Look, for millenia now humans have done all they could to escape the fucking sun: buildings, air conditioners, umbrellas, trees, hell anything with a roof. That should let you know how powerful of an entity we're dealing with.

I'm not knocking wind power as it truly has advantages but I worry about the functionality 20 years from now if a windy area experiences climate changes and wind becomes useless. But that is a problem for the future (and we seem to be very good at putting those off).

89,000 fucking terrawatts, are you kidding me? And here's the kicker, its all free. Nobody charges you to sit in the backyard and lap up sun and nobody charges companies to harness the sun's free energy to convert to power and sell. Its like running a business selling shirts but instead of buying or making your product you walk into work and everyday all the racks are full with new items.

Somebody is gonna make a whole hell of a lot of money on solar power cause their input costs are solely the infrastructure it takes to harness and sell the product. No mining, no drilling, no burning, no reprocessing, no shipping, take out all of those charges and imagine what happens to the price of electricity. I'll let you economics experts figure that out.

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