How do you define the word tremendously?
No I fully confess that the liars in the so called "renewable energy" have been very successful at misrepresenting peak power as being equivalent to average continuous power, which it is not.
But still...
I cited data showing that after 50 years of mindless cheering for solar energy, a single nuclear plant - not even a great nuclear plant for that matter - can produce 50% of American output of solar energy not power.
The EIA figures are very clear on how much energy solar produces, this after sucking nearly a trillion dollars out of the world economy.
Advocates of the failed, expensive and useless (in an environmental sense) also abuse math by citing growth in percentage terms. The "percent" growth only seems large because of its 50 years of failure. If I work 50 years, and have saved $1,000 dollars, and then I announce that my savings have grown by 100% in a single year, no one (rational) will be impressed. It's a different story if I have a billion dollars and grow my assets by 100% that's very different.
The EIA figures, provided by the government, not me, give the total output of all the utility scale electrical energy produced by utility scale solar plants, the figure I provided in the OP text, 26.473 TWh. To convert this to joules, one multiplies 26.473 x 1012 by 3600 seconds per hour to arrive at 9.53 X 1016 J and divides this number by the number of seconds in a calendar year, 365.25 days X 86,400 seconds per day (= 31,557,600 seconds per year) to learn that the average continuous power of all the utility scale solar facilities in the United States in 2015 was 3,019 MW. This is the equivalent of three average sized gas plants.
Tremendous? After 50 years of mindless cheering? Three power plants equivalent in the entire United States?
Solar energy in the United States, at a point where the atmosphere is degrading at an extreme rate probably unparalleled in the last two or three hundred million years, is not "tremendous." It's trivial.
And yet people have foolishly bet the planetary atmosphere on this cheap carny marketing scam.
Solar power has an extremely low energy/mass density, but that has nothing to do with why it's not sustainable.
It's not sustainable because of it's material requirements; it relies heavily on the use of increasingly rare and often toxic metals, nightmare chemical processing, and as pointed out previously, access to dangerous natural gas.
Thousands of papers in the scientific literature on this topic picked more or less at random using Google Scholar: Addressing the terawatt challenge: scalability in the supply of chemical elements for renewable energy
I covered this point in some detail elsewhere, producing a fair number of other scientific references:
Sustaining the Wind Part II, Indium and beyond...
I don't care how popular so called "renewable energy" is, to my mind, substituting a requirement for cadmium, or indium, or tellurium or selenium, for oil and gas is not sustainable, particularly since these elements are rarer, and are in fact, in many cases, more toxic even than petroleum, at least gram for gram, as incredible as that may seem.
Distributing these elements as items of consumer commerce, where many will be under the control of no educated person, all because of a silly and frankly dangerous "distributed energy is wonderful" fad is nothing short of insane. It will cost future generations dearly.
In any case, solar energy cannot substitute for oil and gas; on the contrary, they depend entirely on access to these dangerous fossil fuels. It's why after a two trillion dollar investment in so called "renewable energy" in just the last ten years, oil, coal and gas are all being burned at the highest rate ever observed.
Before using the word "tremendously" one actually needs a sense of scale.
I suggest before announcing that solar energy has grown "tremendously" you look at the numbers.
Have a nice Sunday.
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