Can we depend on electricity only from solar energy?
Of course, 174 petawatts of solar energy fals on the Earth and our total global energy use from all sources is currently a mere 15 terrawatts so the solar energy available is several orders of magnitude more than what we need. Our photovoltaic technology is currently at 42.8% efficiency. Indeed even fossil fuel is solar energy in that it was collected and stored chemically through photosynthesis by nature over millions of years. We’ve also been able to store solar energy as liquid linear hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and H2O so we don’t even have to replace existing vehicles and infrastructure to switch to solar energy as we’re already running on solar energy, the only difference would be that if we synthesized the fuels from CO2 and H2O in our environment we won’t be liberating carbon and hydrogen that had been sequestered away from our ecosystem for millions of years. The problem is profit, storing solar energy as synthetic fuels involve a huge capital expenditure and the operating cost
