Our efforts to harness the sun’s energy to power our future may require up to 5% of the territories of some countries, a new simulation finds. This could have significant direct and indirect environmental side effects, including habitat loss and deforestation. But there are ways to avoid this, Khaled Diab reports.

Sunlight is the greatest life-giving force on our planet. It is also a potential source of more clean energy that we can ever use.

The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the Earth is estimated to be a staggering 3.4 million exajoules (EJ) a year. To give you some idea of how much this is, a single EJ is one quintillion (10¹⁸) joules (the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami measured in at 0.175EJ).

The sun’s rays bathing the Earth in a single year are enough to supply humanity, at its current rate of primary energy consumption, with energy for 7,000 to 8,000 years.

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