I have already talked about how one would go about powering the entire country with renewable energy, but this image is interesting in that it proposes how we could power the entire world with only one type of renewable energy, solar.

Obviously this will never happen, not because it would be infeasible to get all these countries to agree to share the energy provided by these panels (which would be hard), but because it would be a bad idea to rely only on solar. Why ignore wind, biomass, geothermal, tidal, etc? This map does however show that the sun pumps out A LOT of energy, and if we could capture only a small portion of it we could power the entire earth. This map also doesn’t take into consideration that efficiency gains in solar panels. The latest record is apparently 43% which is pretty damn good. I also wonder if the map takes into account things like solar thermal electricity (see here, here and here[look down at the Sterling dish things]) which I have to assume it does as it mentions “all energy needs.”