I was surprised by this number (I would have guessed total power consumption was a much lower fraction of total solar energy), so I just ran some quick numbers and it basically checks out.
This document claims that “Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of power to be exact.”
Our World in Data says total energy consumption in 2022 was 179,000 terawatt-hours
Plugging this in and doing some dimensional analysis, it looks like the earth uses about 2000x the current energy consumption, which is the same OOM.
173,000 terawatts of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use.
But plugging this number in with the OWiD value for 2022 gives about 8500x multiplier (I think the “more than 10000x” claim was true at the time it was made though). So maybe it’s an OOM off, but for a loose claim using round numbers it seems close enough for me.
[edit: Just realized that Richard121 quotes some of the same figures above for total energy use and solar irradiance—embarrassingly, I hadn’t read his comment before posting this, I just saw kave’s claim while scrolling and wanted to check it out. Good that we seem to have the same numbers though!]
I was surprised by this number (I would have guessed total power consumption was a much lower fraction of total solar energy), so I just ran some quick numbers and it basically checks out.
This document claims that “Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of power to be exact.”
Our World in Data says total energy consumption in 2022 was 179,000 terawatt-hours
Plugging this in and doing some dimensional analysis, it looks like the earth uses about 2000x the current energy consumption, which is the same OOM.
A NOAA site claims it’s more like 10,000x:
But plugging this number in with the OWiD value for 2022 gives about 8500x multiplier (I think the “more than 10000x” claim was true at the time it was made though). So maybe it’s an OOM off, but for a loose claim using round numbers it seems close enough for me.
[edit: Just realized that Richard121 quotes some of the same figures above for total energy use and solar irradiance—embarrassingly, I hadn’t read his comment before posting this, I just saw kave’s claim while scrolling and wanted to check it out. Good that we seem to have the same numbers though!]