Reply #5: In terms of World energy sources, hydro is 6% and other renewables are 1%

[Bread and Circus]

that means the world gets about 7% of it's energy from the sun in one way or another. That is despite the huge industry bias towards fossil fuels. This actually exceeds nuclear contributions (6%).

The sun delivers about 1 exajoule of energy to the earth every minute. The earth's annual energy use is about 471 exajoules. That means the earth delivers that amount of energy to the earth in 8 hours or so. It's not that the energy isn't there, it's that it is just not being captured.

One of the problems is that alot of solar-energy-to-electricity use has thus far been built around photovoltaics that are inefficient and expensive. However, there are alot of projects going on that go past photovoltaics and supercede them in terms of energy capture efficiency.

100 square miles of sunlight in Nevada would provide us with all the electricity we need, by some estimates.

Mother nature gives us everything we need, if only we had the wisdom to use it.