Editor’s note: This question was asked in response to Electronics Cooling’s recent webinar by Roger Stout. To view the webinar, click here.
Question: You referred to the sun delivering as much energy in an hour as humankind uses in a year, but then you started talking about power consumption. Aren’t you confusing energy and power?
Answer: Good catch! Indeed, I reported both global energy consumption and solar energy delivery in W, which is energy per unit time, and I somewhat carelessly implied that they represent total energy used in 2013. To be perfectly clear, that 2013 figure would be the average global power consumption by humanity, if you took the total energy projection for 2013 and divided by the number of seconds in a year. Either way, the ratio comes out to 0.016%. In 2013, we’ll use one hour’s worth of the solar energy striking the planet.
-Roger Stout
