how much energy is produced by solar cells compared to all other electricity production in the world?

The Energy Information Agency is a US organization that collects statistics, and as a power engineering student, I often am interested in the Electrical Generation numbers.

According to this page 4715 Billion kWh are generated by renewables including the much more developed Hydro and Biomass This page breaks that number down, and 95.9 billion kWh come from solar. This page estimates the total energy generated world wide is 21532 billion kWh.

*These numbers are from 2012, and the current trend is that solar is going up, so you should expect these numbers to be higher.

That means by the percentages 0.45% of all the world's generated electricity comes from Solar 2.03% of all the world's renewable electricity comes from Solar 21.9% of all the world's generated electricity comes from renewables - predominantly hydro and biomass.

To elaborate past the scope of your question however, and pardon me if I treat you like you asked this in ELI5 when you already understand this, but Power and Energy are two different things. Power refers to the rate at which energy is produced or consumed (by that I don't mean destroyed of course 2nd law of thermodynamics). Electricity generation has a metric called Capacity Factor - that is in the course of a year, what fraction of the energy that could possibly be produced by a plant actually is. u/bobdilbertson mentions nuclear which has among the highest capacity factors. Low capacity factors is not ideal for base-load the amount of electricity needed to be provided at all time, but it is quite important to meet peak loads. For the record, solar and wind have low capacity factors.

One reason solar is so bad is that just a little bit of shade on the solar panel can drop its efficiency to 0. Distributed generation itself is not that big of a challenge, but forming clean 60Hz or 50Hz AC power with constantly changing sources is challenging. That's why lots of engineers and physicists despise the "Solar Freaking Roadways" kickstarter. Just because we can do something doesn't mean its a good idea to do so. It will always be more practical to have solar panels out of the shade is sunny locations, not being driven over by cars and bikes, and titled upwards facing the equator.

Because solar panels skew towards lower capacity factor, the rated number of watts (power) produced by solar farms will be a larger relative to the worldwide number than the actual number of _watthours (energy) produced.

BUT! Don't get down on solar. The more they build, the cheaper it gets and the more efficient they become. At any point in time, 175 Petawatts hit the Earth's surface. The entire US's electricity demand for 2013 for 4.06 Petawatt hours. That's a lot of energy striking the Earth.

The big buzzword in my field, if you ask me, is energy storage. I hear it called "The holy grail" maybe twice a year. If a good energy storage system takes off, and by good I mean, much better than what we have now, then it won't matter what the capacity factor of wind and solar are. We generate a lot of power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and store what's not consumed.

In summary, I'm a fan of nuclear. People on both sides of the issue make some bold claims on solar. It's not a worthless piece of technology that's not worth developing but it's not the end all be all answer to global warming and we shouldn't slap them on roads.

/r/askscience Thread