What is the energy output of of sun? And, what creates the energy output of The Sun?

Question: What is the energy output of of sun? And, what creates the energy output of The Sun?
- Keywords:
  energy,
  nuclear,
  sun
Asked by balletshoes1998 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
- Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:
  
  Well, the insolation we get on Earth is about 1000 watts per square metre. If you get closer that gets more intense, but if you average it over the whole sphere around the sun it comes to 4×10^23 (23 zeroes after it) watts, which is joules per second. So every second the sun is putting out that much energy.
  
  All of it comes from nuclear fusion – joining hydrogen nuclei (and eventually heavier elements) together, which creates energy.
- Karen Masters answered on 17 Mar 2012:
  
  Energy is created in the centre of the Sun when hydrogen atoms get fused together into helium (it’s called nuclear fusion).
  
  Adam looked up the numbers already, so I won’t bother Googling them again. It’s a huge amount of energy though – we could easilly run the whole of civilization off the bit of it which hits Earth if we had enough solar panels.
  
  I heard this week that plants every day use size times as much energy as the whole of civilization (thanks QI!). I thought that was an interesting fact – and all of that energy comes straight from the Sun…
- Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:
  
  The power output of the sun at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere in 1 square metre is about the same as a kettle. If you add up how big the Earth’s atmosphere is then you get about an unimaginably large 10^14 kettle’s worth of power. Wikipedia says this is roughly as much energy per second as all the electricity in UK after one month. (A month is about 2.6 million seconds.)
  
  So, if the UK could convert just 1/2,600,000 th of the sunlight hitting the Earth into electricity, we could have all the electricity that we need.
  
  Nuclear fusion in the centre of the sun creates the energy that we get, because it is so hot and dense that hydrogen can fuse into helium. To do this on Earth requires special fusion reactors, and a large one is being built in France, called ITER, to try and create cheap and clean electricity based on how the Sun works.
- Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:
  
  The sun is a pretty big scale power plant, and makes 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts of energy every second! That’s more than ten million of the biggest power plants we have could produce!
  
  But the earth doesn’t get all that energy, because it goes off in all directions – we get just a billionth of it, but that’s still plenty for all the plants and solar panels on Earth to use!