Question

What are disadvantages of non conventional sources of energy?

Answer 1

Its disadvantage is that we would have to cover a lot of land to power everything 24/7, perhaps up to a few percent of the land, in order to provide high standards for all, including the billions of people still in poverty. With any power source, you need to build up the capacity to the inverse of its capacity factor, and build the storage. If the world could be powered by say, 5 terawatts of solar only when the sunlight is good, then we’d need about 5x that amount because it has a 20% capacity factor, meaning that (after being averaged out over evenings, nights, early mornings and cloudy days) it works only about 20% of the time.