Global solar electric potential: A review of their technical and sustainable limits

Despite the fact that renewable energies offer a great theoretical potential of energy and that most of them have only a small share of global primary and final consumption (less than 2% of final World energy consumption was provided by wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and biofuels together) [1], their limits should be carefully analyzed. While other methodologies are based on theoretical efficiencies of renewable energies, generous estimations of effective global surface that could be occupied by the renewable infrastructure and/or ignore the mineral reserve limits, our assessment is based on a top-down methodology (de Castro et al. [2,3]) that takes into account real present and foreseeable future efficiencies and surface occupation of technologies, land competence and other limits such as mineral reserves.

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