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That figure, I think, comes from this report that was linked in your link. Having skimmed it, I can't tell the exact methodology they use, but it seems they take some sort of weighted average of the area/energy/year of the various solar plants in the US and use some basic modeling as it extrapolates up. I see no mention of transmission losses or of attempting to model the geographical and grid locations the next solar plants would actually be built to reach the power production that actually does power all USA households.
Locations aren't fungible in power plants due in part to transmission losses (among other factors), and obviously this is even moreso for solar plants because location directly affects how much sunlight is received and also the weather which is affected by the location. As such, any sort of meaningful estimate of solar plant area we need to power all USA households is necessarily going to involve modeling specific plants in specific locations to match the load that's being drawn at various locations without negatively affecting the grid with congestion and such. Whatever modeling that's being done in that paper doesn't seem to come anywhere near that.
Solar and nuclear together, perhaps those two techs could be all we need for our energy needs; I'd say nuclear would be holding up 99% of the burden in that case, though.
That's before getting into the massive battery (and other energy storage) build up that would happen to account for solar's intermittent uptime if we were to go full 100% solar.
That's a bit nitpicky. Storage is a better objection to this hypothetical than transmission losses (which are well understood and not very important) . But it's a theoretical, order of magnitude discussion . He claimed that just by "seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply the energy", it would seem absurd, and it doesn't. Solar panels are a 'cut-out-the-middleman' form of agriculture, and look how much space that takes up.
But assuming doomers can get past this theoretical argument, I want to highlight just how incredibly extensive their claims are, and how far they are from proving their thesis. Before we run out of food, the oil will have to run out, the coal will run out, all the other fossil fuels will run out, nuclear will fail, solar will fail, all the renewables will fail. And not just ‘oh we couldn’t make it to 100% world energy consumption on just this one thing’, every single one has to fail completely: it’s not just that they each don’t scale, they all somehow don’t work anymore.
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