The overestimated potential of solar energy to mitigate climate change

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the optimistic assumptions about solar energy's capacity to significantly reduce climate change, highlighting overlooked resource limitations and biases.

Contribution

It challenges prevailing optimistic views by emphasizing the resource constraints and biases that overestimate solar energy's potential for climate mitigation.

Findings

Solar energy's resource limitations are often underestimated.

Optimistic biases influence policy and public perception.

Resource constraints may limit solar energy's role in climate mitigation.

Abstract

Many aspects of solar energy and policies to tackle the energy transition have been neglected. Even though the earth is plenty of sun energy, our planet is not plenty of resources to transform that energy into electricity. This is a case between many others where an strongly optimistic bias is shadowing the white elephant in the room.