Hannah Ritchie at By the Numbers:
The numbers were quite staggering. So staggering in fact, that I doubted myself. I ran the calculations many times, convinced I’d accidentally added a zero somewhere. I asked Pablo to also come up with an estimate, without telling him how I got to my numbers. As it turns out, we took slightly different approaches, but landed somewhere similar. We wrote up all of our assumptions and methodology if you’re interested.
If we put solar panels on those 32 million hectares of biofuel land, we could generate around 32,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Incidentally, that’s the same amount of electricity as the world consumes in a year.
So we could keep the biofuels, which amount to around 1,400 TWh of energy, and meet around 4% of global transport demand. Or we could use it for solar and produce enough electricity to meet the world’s current electricity demand.
More here.
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