Article Image

IPFS News Link • Energy

Solar power for the whole world could be generated from a relatively small patch of land,

• naturalnews.com by Edsel Cook

But solar energy can fulfill the world's power needs, and an article on Inverse states that the average nation can set aside a relatively small percentage of its land area for solar farms.

Renewable energy currently makes up 10 percent of the U.S. energy production. That amount is split between solar, wind, and hydroelectric sources.

Finder.com, a website that provides price comparison services, looked up how much land area will be taken up by enough solar panels to serve global power needs. Their interactive map shows that devoting five percent of the Earth's surface to solar power could meet the power requirements of 87 percent of the world's countries.

If you put together all those solar farms, they'd occupy 1.1 million square kilometers, an area that is smaller than the country of South Africa. (Related: 2018 could be the year "clean energy" becomes "cheap energy.")