The Sunlight Budget of Earth
- Author: Asimov Press
- Full Title: The Sunlight Budget of Earth
- Type:
- URL: https://www.asimov.press/p/sunlight-budget?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn
Highlights
- Modern biotechnology is powered by sunlight. Light-gobbling algae, both natural and engineered, are harvested and squeezed for biofuels or dried and pressed to make shoes. We use sugarcane and sugar beets — essentially autonomous, self-replicating, solar-powered biofactories — to mass-produce sugar. That sugar, along with hydrolyzed yeast, [1|1] form the basic media used to grow genetically engineered E. coli, yeast, and other microbes that make various medicines and foods. At some point in the supply chain, nearly every bioengineered product either is a solar-powered plant or derives its energy from one. (View Highlight)
- The Energy Institute’s 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy estimates that humanity’s solar industry currently soaks up sunlight at a rate of approximately 1,200 gigawatts (GW), [3|3] of which about 240 GW is usefully converted to electricity. (View Highlight)
- This estimate begins with successfully-absorbed photons [9|9] and ends with final accumulated biomass (for C3 plants, those that use the Calvin cycle for carbon fixation and make up the bulk of plant productivity worldwide) to arrive at 22,000 GW of sunlight absorbed — pretty close to the amount of sunlight required for current global electricity needs. (View Highlight)
- Feeding the model detailed satellite data, they estimate total global, wild plant productivity at about 50 billion metric tons of carbon per year, which, using the same methods as before, equates to about 120,000 GW of sunlight absorbed by terrestrial plants. (View Highlight)