Humankind generates 20 TW today. That’s a massive jump.
And everyone wants more power. It determines what society can do.
But 20 TW is a pittance in the grand scheme of the vast universe. Imagine if we were generating 100 TW or 1,000 TW.
That’s why we talk about stuff like the Kardashev Scale — type 1, 2, 3 civilization type stuff.
Electricity is not currently cheap. 20 TW is a pittance. One day humanity will reach a point where we’re generating 500 TW of power and questions of being able to smelt aluminum or make drinking water from brine seem almost like a joke. We will have flying construction drones 24/7 at that scale of energy production. At that point, we’ll be asking questions like “when will we have enough energy to terraform a planet?”
Of course, there are side effects of greater power generation such as global warming… but once again, it’s a scale thing. The universe is vast.
Slowly, we are getting there.
Quantification of global waste heat and its environmental effects - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... - Applied Energy Volume 235, 1 February 2019, Pages 1314-1334
* 49.3–51.5% of global energy use would end up as waste heat in 2030.
* Transport sector accounts for the largest (43%) recoverable waste heat in 2030.
> Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
What does this mean? It means we are most of the way there with solar and batteries alone, even if we need a bit of carbon based generation to bridge the gap while solar and battery deployments scale globally. Solar and batteries will only continue to get less expensive and better.
Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Solar PV go brrr.