They seem like big numbers until you compare it with the enormity of what we already do.
Or about 30 million acres if you’re in to that sort of thing.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.
Who cares?
No one pays the wholesale price.
What price does the retail customer pay?
Here the wholesale prices are far more relevant economically.
Still, what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.
If politics is a significant cost factor, no amount of technology is going to fix that.
Or, as Jimmy Carr put it: But you go, yeah, you can have net zero, as long as you don't give a fuck about poor people, right? If you don't give a fuck about poor people, of course we can do net zero. - https://youtu.be/H3FwqPkPSHE
> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.
To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.
Markets solve diffuse problems really well, people signal how much their section of the problem is worth solving and the market judges whether the overall problem can be solved cost effectively. Getting food to everyone is a diffuse problem for example.
Tragedy of the commons is different. Markets don't solve how to solve owning things in common and the usual market recommendation is not to do that.
How much money would a solar farm bring in yearly? How onerous would the regulations be?
Appropriate regulations and enforcement is what is missing but ⅔ of country is brainwashed by billionaires and Fox News that "gubberment bad" and "regulations are communism".
https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-one...
But cooperation only occurs when the entire group is at risk, that isn’t the case currently.
e.g. diesel(heating oil), jet fuel, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, etc
There is a balance of these.
This also doesn't take into account the extra electricity needed to replace the alternative heating methods in the home that utilize these other materials we're abandoning
In the US, residential solar is 5x-6x more expensive than in Australia per W, i.e. on identical system costs, not on what's generated. And they pay their labor better than we do in the US at the same time. It's because of a lot of regulatory and utility interference, and a laundry list of other things:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
This is the headline from a non-partisan energy media outlet when it comes to wind: " How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost---The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids."
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/offshore-wind/how-trump...
And when it comes to batteries, people that don't care about the effects of mining or oil extraction or toxicity of gasoline all of a sudden start to get all worked up about supposedly "toxic" lithium batteries, because they've consumed a ton of propaganda on the matter, and no facts. People also seem to think that we somehow burn lithium, instead of mine it once, and use a tiny amount (dozens of pounds) to power an entire car, which can then be recycled.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been told that we can't do solar because it takes "too much land" or "physics" by people that pretend to be good with numbers but have never figured out how to calculate the actual requirementns by solar...
This is a US-specific comment, but the rest of the world is not as foolish and is plowing full-steam ahead to a world of ever decreasing energy costs because they are not stopping the progress of better technology.
see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...
The Southern Ocean wind installation is to the right scale or not?