100% solar-powered future is impossible

Planting some trees and using land more efficiently are just as effective at reducing carbon emissions as green energy schemes, and they’re dirt cheap.  This is something America should consider instead of wasting billions on failed green energy schemes, on instituting carbon taxes that actually end up increasing global emissions, we should instead focus on common sense environmental protections that we can all agree on. Source   True environmentalists look at the whole picture, not just what’s politically convenient.​

Switching To 100% Solar Power Is Impossible, and this holds true even if the efficiency of solar panels quadruples. —There’s Not Enough Silver On planet Earth.  The debate over carbon emissions and the switch to “green energy” is usually fought over whether or not green energy is the best way to help the environment, or whether it is a cost-effective way of doing so.  (more, later, on how industrial solar is not really green energy )

Modern solar panels are about 20% efficient.  This just means that 20% of the energy in solar radiation is converted into electricity, while the rest is lost as heat.  We would  need to completely cover an area the size of Spain in solar panels to generate enough electricity to meet global energy demands by 2030.  This is clearly an enormous waste of land—it would be better to preserve that land, and instead switch to nuclear power, or stick with fossil fuels.

This means that 5,616,600 tons of silver would be required to build enough solar panels to power the world.
That’s way more silver (7.2 times more) than we have—or that exists.

We have only mined, and have access to a total of 777,275 tons of silver—this isn’t even close to enough silver to build enough solar panels.
In fact, even if we mined all of the silver on earth’s crust, there still wouldn’t be enough to make the transition to 100% solar power—even if solar panels became four-times as efficient we still couldn’t do it.  Source