Where does that 0.3 TW figure come from? That seems awfully high.

Oops it’s actually 0.6 TW.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Convert TWh to TW for a year average.

Huh! I'm kind of stunned that we only use ~30x the power that we did back then. If I'd been asked to guess I would have added another 0 or even two of them.

Yeah we had an exponential jump when we discovered oil but we maxed that out and the growth has been linear since (and paying for it environmentally too).

I’m waiting for the next big major discovery in energy generation.

We’re always on the verge of fusion… fusion will be like the discovery of oil. Humanity will jump forward… well, technologically at least.

You're trying to converse with a LLM. It's made up.

Nope it’s 100% legit and I even remembered it wrong. It’s actually 0.6 TW.

You can get the number of TW from this report https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Convert TWh to TW for a year average.

jfc. What is the point? What do people get out of doing that?

I don't know, but HN in particular has an AI-sycophancy problem where I see this most common versus other link aggregator sites.

is that a sustained 20TW? Absolutely crazy that we're generating 60kwh per person daily. Where does it all go?

Lots of it is lost to heat with legacy fossil generation.

You have pretty much the same heat losses with nuclear, or anything else where you heat water to turn a turbine.

Nuclear is low carbon, it’s fine we lose heat to extract that energy versus stationary and mobile combustion generation, as there is no other effective way to extract that energy at this time.

Quantification of global waste heat and its environmental effects - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... - Applied Energy Volume 235, 1 February 2019, Pages 1314-1334

* 49.3–51.5% of global energy use would end up as waste heat in 2030.

* Transport sector accounts for the largest (43%) recoverable waste heat in 2030.

I made no claims about carbon.

To note, we are almost at installing 1TW of solar PV every year globally.