[drozycki]

There are 13 million exajoules (3,611,400,000 TWh) of energy within a couple of miles of the earth's surface [0], enough to cover 100% of 2023 worldwide energy use (181,000 TWh [1]) for 20,000 years. Its environmental footprint is non-negligible but probably better than solar+storage per unit energy generated. It uses 5% of the land area and provides base load.

[0] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-... (see section 2 on page 1-4) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

[pfdietz]

And it works even better at high latitude, the opposite of solar.