The total area of solar panels it would take to power the world, Europe, and Germany
Omg what
Well…only kind of. What this map doesn’t show is that:
1: on a less distorted map you could see that the red box is about the same size as Spain. It’s not really a good idea to pave over a Spain-sized slab of the planet. Deserts are important too, and that would kill off a whole Spain-sized chunk of one. Even if there’s plenty of Sahara to go around, it’s still not cool.
2: that location represents ideal conditions for photo-voltaic cells. If you located the solar cells someplace other than a honking huge tropical desert, you would need a lot more of them to collect the same amount of energy.
3: putting them all in the Sahara is a bad idea also because dumping the major power source for the world in northern Africa and western Asia has historically led to a near-irresistible temptation for the West to meddle with countries that are already sick of us.
BUT if you were to take all the useless flat barren spaces that humanity has ALREADY paved over—say, the many rooftops and parking lots of the world—and plonk solar paneling down on top of THOSE… Well, since a lot of those are not in sunny tropical locations, you would need a much larger total square footage, so it might not meet ALL the world’s energy demands, but it sure would put a hell of a dent in them.
(Seriously, though, check this out. Desertec is this big European initiative to string solar energy farms throughout northern Africa and the Mideast. I like how toward the end there’s a section on “What does Africa think*?” But nobody seems to have considered the really pretty obvious question, “So what happens when you piss off Egypt AGAIN and they kick you out of the country AGAIN, and then a government that doesn’t like you has your solar panels?”
* Africa thinks they recognize the scent of exploitation in the morning.)