A new report released by climate and energy think tanks Carbon Tracker and Ember Climate shows that the technical potential of wind and solar to power the world is around 100 times greater than total electricity demand, with rapidly increasing economic and physical capacity to take advantage of sun and wind to fully remove fossil fuels from human society.

The report also finds that the land constraints on renewable energy growth are far less than commonly stated. Harry Benham, report co-author and chairman of thinktank Ember-Climate, said: "The world does not need to exploit its entire renewable resource -- just 1% is enough to replace all fossil fuel usage. Each year we are fuelling the climate crisis by burning three million years of fossilised sunshine in coal, oil and gas while we use just 0.01% of daily sunshine."

Global energy consumption in 2019 was 65 petawatt hours, but the technological potential to capture sunlight and convert it into electricity is 5,800 petawatt hours, "as much power in a single year as could be generated by burning all known fossil fuel reserves"