The Earth receives enough solar energy every hour to satisfy our energy needs for an entire year.

[Flaxbee]

Just pause for a second, and think of that. Enough light every single hour to satisfy our needs for an entire year.

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/06/dna-constructs-antenna-solar-energy

Artificial photosynthesis is one of the hot trends in energy research. A large number of the worlds' energy problems could be resolved if it were possible to recreate the ability plants have to transform solar energy into fuel. The Earth receives enough solar energy every hour to satisfy our energy needs for an entire year.

A research team at Chalmers Univ. of Technology has made a nanotechnology breakthrough in the first step required for artificial photosynthesis. The team has demonstrated that it is possible to use self-assembling DNA molecules as scaffolding to create artificial systems that collect light. The results were recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Self-assembling system
Scaffolding in plants and algae consists of a large number of proteins that organize chlorophyll molecules to ensure effective light collection. The system is complicated and would basically be impossible to construct artificially.

"It's all over if a bond breaks," says Jonas Hannestad, PhD of physical chemistry. "If DNA is used instead to organize the light-collecting molecules, the same precision is not achieved but a dynamic self-constructing system arises."

[msongs]

1. when big oil figures out to control it, solar will take over nt

[Nimajneb Nilknarf]

2. It's fortunate that most of that energy radiates back out into space promptly

Otherwise we'd be roasted alive.

[gcomeau]

3. Try to keep in mind...

...that that energy is already being used for a lot of things. Like keeping all the plant life on the planet alive... or keeping us all from freezing to death. You can't just refer to the blanket sum of all "the solar energy" that hits the earth as if it's up for grabs.

Yes, there's a lot of excess energy there to be harvested, but they need to figure out what that number is first and then talk in THAT context. Talking about all the energy we can't use without killing ourselves in the process is silly. It's just an attention grabbing pointless statement.

[CK_John]

4. How do you put a meter on it and you'll live well for at 3 generations.

[wercal]

5. I'll try the math

On average, over a 24 hour day, the earth recieves 164 watts per square meter (http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1998/ph162/l4.html)...164,000,000 watts per square kilometer...and the earth is 510,000,000 square kilometers (including water and everything)....year...or 836 Pwh, every hour.

The annual energy usage of the world is 143 Pwh a year.

Pretty impressive.

So its really a matter of capturing enough of this energy. This energy is fixed, it is what actually reaches the earth, and cannot be increased by any technology. All we can improve upon is how much of this energy is captured. For starters, the 70% of earth that is water should be removed...so 836 Pwh becomes 250 Pwh....and it would need 57% efficiency to meet the world's needs. Most cells are 15%...but new technology boosts it to 30%. So, using today's technolgy, covering all the Earth's land mass won't quite get you a year's worth of power in an hour.

But let's see how much land mass would be needed to power the earth for one hour. If we use 30%, the land mass has the potential to produce 75 Pwh. The annual use of 143 Pwh becomes 0.0163 PWH per hour...or we would need 0.021733% of 75 Pwh, or 0.021733% of the Earth's land mass...or 33,251 square kilometers coverd with panels. I visualize better in english units...so that's 12,838 square miles...or approximately 113 mile x 113 mile giant solar panel.

Actually seems very possible, especially if this panel is divided up across the globe. The real problem is storage. The power company typically does not store power...and if they do, it is only a small fraction of what they produce. They produce energy as it is needed...its really amazing to think about. Portugal has a wind farm that lifts water to store potential energy, and I think this is the best way to store energy for the electric grid. Imagine a lake at the bottom of Hoover dam...water is released through the dam, to create electricity at night...and during the day, solar powered pumps pump the water out of the lower lake and back up to the top of the dam.

Of course this is all very expensive...and battery power for cars has range issues...so any quantum leaps in solar power would have to be accompanied by a leap in energy storage.