Our planet spins around a giant ball of energy called the sun 🌞. Every day, it sends us 6,000 times more energy than we actually need.

Sunlight reaching Earth equals 3.8 million exajoules each year.
With all our giant cities, mega factories, TikToks, crypto-mining, 4K cat videos, and nonstop wars, humanity burns around 600 exajoules every year.

The whole world could run on solar energy using just 1.2% of the Sahara Desert covered by solar panels. It’s clean, cheap, and almost unlimited.

So… why aren’t we doing it?

There are 6 main reasons:

🔌 1. Energy storage

• Solar works only when the sun shines. But we need power at night, on cloudy days, in winter. Always.
• So we need massive batteries, pumped hydro, or other storage — expensive and tricky at scale.

🌍 2. Infrastructure

• Most sunny land is far from big cities.
• We’d need thousands of kilometers of high-voltage cables to move energy efficiently.
• Current grids weren’t designed for that much variable power flowing both ways.

⛏️ 3. Rare materials

• Solar panels and batteries need rare minerals (lithium, cobalt, etc.)
• Mining those creates other environmental and ethical problems.

💸 4. Money & economics

• Initial investment is huge.
• Many countries or companies don’t want to switch if profits are uncertain.
• Oil and gas are still cheaper in many places (thanks to subsidies).

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 5. Politics & power

• Fossil fuel industries have massive lobbying power.
• Some governments are heavily dependent on oil revenue.
• Switching to solar means changing jobs, supply chains, geopolitics. That’s scary for many.

🧠 6. Behavior & habits

• People don’t like change.
• We’re used to cheap, always-on fossil energy.
• Switching to a solar-based system requires re-thinking consumption, timing, even lifestyles.

So it’s not only about installing panels.
It’s about redesigning a global system that’s been built for 100+ years around burning stuff.

It’s totally doable. But we need enough courage, cooperation, and cleverness.

I underlined cooperation for reason. Humans aren’t exactly known for being a united front. We’re split by borders, religions and egos — chasing personal or national interests, while the idea of a shared human goal collects dust.

Anyway, the sun still shines. It has 5 billion years left before fading away.

So yeah… we’ve got time.