At least three.

km

American

You can't mix units like that

I'd want to say "about a week", but I learned not to overestimate people, so probably 5 days top

Technically nuclear came from a different star. The sun won't create those kinds of heavier elements until it burns through its hydrogen and helium fuel to start fusing its way up to lead, and I don't think it's massive enough to actually reach the kind of supernova collapse required to smash lesser elements together into heavier elements than that in any significant amount. So technically, fission is the only the form of energy that isn't based on solar. It's just the still-cooling-embers leftover from someone else's dying star, a whole bunch of billions of years ago. I guess you could say the sun's gravity at least attracted it all into this general vicinity though, at least until the Earth's own gravity started pulling its own weight.

except for geothermal which comes from the Earth’s rotational momentum

emm that is not the source of geothermal energy..

Didn't the molten core also originate in some way from the sun?

...and it's still 20 years away.

Dyson swarms would be more feasible. Heat rejection on a sphere would give an engineer a complete meltdown.

First a Dyson Ring; have you read any of the Ringworld series by David Niven? And for the time being solar panels, solar architecture, cardboard solar fucking ovens, solar deathray from a satellite dish, etc, etc, etc.....

Do you mean something like the Mojave Solar Project, which has produced 5.1 million MegaWatt hours since 2015?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Solar_Project

Or do you mean something like a smaller scale, e.g. home use? Look up Parabolic Solar Collector.

Or are you thinking of an Heliostat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat Something like the Solar Two, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat#/media/File:Solar_two.jpg

Nah. Hunter runs on fossil fuel. Remember he was being paid a fortune by a Ukrainian Gas company.

What a nice coincidence, just recently edited this. I usually don't get to use my custom made memes twice.

Tidal and geothermal are not.

Most usable energy on Earth comes from fusion of hydrogen into helium in the Sun, creating radiation that hits the Earth. That's solar energy, of course, either thermal or photovoltaics, but also the wind caused by uneven warming, the evaporation and condensation of water that flows downhill for hydro power, the chemical bonds formed by photosynthesis making renewable biofuels or older fossil fuels.

Some portion of energy on Earth is gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of stuff moving around settling into a lower energy state: the moon dragging the oceans around, the heat of the Earth's core spinning and tectonic plates moving from the momentum of all the dust that got pulled into what is now a planet. Geothermal and tidal energy mostly come from these planet scale phenomena.

Some portion of energy is the release of energy stored in nuclei formed from some past supernova, of less stable isotopes of atoms heavier than iron. Some portion of geothermal is traceable to this kind of nuclear decay, and obviously we can isolate and enrich those nuclear elements into fission fuel for nuclear power, as well.

Hard to categorize the second and third categories into solar power, though. Yeah, it comes from astronomical phenomena tracing back to how our solar system and planets were formed, from the materials they're made out of, and found their way into their current shapes and orbits, but is that solar power?

Big Bang Power

Stellar? Mmmm never thought about this word much. Constellation? Stars? Stellar?

I have some holes to go down

My son would argue that governments should have invested heavily in thorium reactor technology instead.

I know right. How can I become a super hero from exposure if I can't get some uranium.

Too expensive

You only buy them once though.

You buy the panels, and they last for 25+ years though.

In those 25+ years, there's time to develop your own domestic supply chain.

Marginally? Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.

You don't think that's significant progress? 5x the power. You don't think that requires improvements in technology?