# Wind/Solar power = No room for US?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wind-solar-power-no-room-for-us/49939>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 14, 2001, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wind-solar-power-no-room-for-us/49939 "2001-01-14T02:17:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![erics](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/d9b06d/32.png) [@erics](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erics)\
**Post date:** [January 14, 2001, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wind-solar-power-no-room-for-us/49939/1 "2001-01-14T02:17:37Z")

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I heard on a NOVA special that if we, as a country, switched totally to solar and wind power there would be NO room left for us Peeps.

That the country would be Farms for food and power…ALL OF IT.

Is this true? Anyone else ever heard this?

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**Author:** ![Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/50afbb/32.png) [@Duck\_Duck\_Goose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duck_Duck_Goose)\
**Post date:** [January 14, 2001, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wind-solar-power-no-room-for-us/49939/2 "2001-01-14T02:33:18Z")

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This is what was actually said.

Broadcast Transcript  
PBS Air date: April 18, 2000  
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/27gwwarming.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/27gwwarming.html)

> [@](#):
>
> MARTY HOFFERT: There’s going to be a certain inevitable amount of land use issues associated with renewable energy, in that you’re going to need a lot of area. If you wanted to supply 10 terrawatts of power and you wanted to do it with biomass energy, you would need an area of the Earth equal approximately 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, land surface area. And that’s a huge amount of land. That’s all the land that’s used in human agriculture right now.
> 
> Now, if you needed 30 terrawatts and you wanted to do it with biomass, you would need three times as much. So you could sort of imagine a world where the only things on the planet would be human beings and wheat, and we would eat the wheat and we would use the wheat to make alcohol for our vehicles, but there wouldn’t be any other biological diversity because we would have appropriated all of the land surfaces to do that. That’s the kind of issue that you have to deal with when you seriously talk about stabilizing CO2 in the atmosphere.

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**Author:** ![erics](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/d9b06d/32.png) [@erics](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erics)\
**Post date:** [January 14, 2001, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wind-solar-power-no-room-for-us/49939/3 "2001-01-14T02:41:01Z")

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amazing. Thank you.

perfect.

wow.