• Question: If we could harness all the energy from the sun for a day how long will it power the earth?

    Asked by Izzyb to Helen, Hugh, Julian on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      The sun outputs about 3.846×10^26 Watts which is Joules/second.
      The total use of power on the Earth is about 1.5 x 10^17 Watts
      So – if we could capture all the Suns output, we would have enough power to run the Earth about a billion times over. Or put another way, if we could capture 1 billionth of the Suns output, we’d be doing just fine!
      Of course, only a small part of the Suns output hits the Earth, must just goes out into space.

    • Photo: Hugh Osborn

      Hugh Osborn answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Or, put another way, one second of the sun’s energy output could power the energy needs of Earth for more than 60 years!

      However, Earth’s energy use keeps rising and rising. That exponential growth means that, unless we slow down our energy needs, we will require the entire power of the sun just to live in 1400 years.

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