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by ben_w 1372 days ago
Romania by itself has the land area for 3.5 TW of electricity average over a year, even assuming 15% efficient PV and a 10% capacity factor; the actual capacity factor given Romanian climate would be more like 5.5 TW; current global electricity use is only 2.7 TW.

Cyprus (the island) has a better climate, so despite its small size, it could produce 137% of the entire EU's current annual demand from PV.

Land use just isn't close to being a limiting factor, so even though PV does indeed need more land than some other things, it just doesn't matter.
2 comments
WHATDOESIT 1372 days ago
You're talking about electricity, I am talking about replacing the entire energetic demand. That means fuel for ICE vehicles, ships, etc in addition to all the fossil fuels used purely for heating.

What Cyprus, Romania and other states do internally is not so interesting - every state is selling electricity for outrageous prices internationally, so it's not really something we'd want to rely on.

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ben_w 1372 days ago
My point remains valid even if you want to replace all energy and not just what is already electrified, and also boost global energy use to the per-capita rate of Qatar (I think the highest in the world at about 2.5 times the average of the USA), and also boost world population to 10 billion, and also the PV is placed slightly worse than if it was randomly scattered.

Simultaneously. And by a large margin.

There's a lot of land on this planet of ours.

(The reason I chose Cyprus as an example is because of how small it is, and yet could supply so much if it wanted to. Any single one of Bavaria, Lombardy, Brussels, Lubusz, Aragón, Île-de-France could individually supply the entire EU just from PV, not merely meet their own needs, but again this is just to give a sense of scale — the correct placement of PV is seldom "all in one place").

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ncmncm 1372 days ago
Land use, even if, would not matter, because solar coexists with existing uses. Float solar on reservoirs and canals, post it in fence-rows on pasture and cropland, lay it out on industrial and warehouse roofing.
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