"That's crazy" isn't a rebuttal; it's just a statement of surprise. But I already know that what I said was surprising. As I said, in 01800 it was "crazy" to contemplate people safely traveling at 30 miles per hour (13 m/s in non-medieval units) or crossing the Atlantic under steam, and in 01830 it was being done, if not yet commonplace. In 01954 it was "crazy" to use a computer for "clerical work" like compilation; in 01984 children played with computers in schools, running BASIC interpreters and paint programs. How could we go about figuring out what's really going to happen in 30 years? It certainly isn't by simply believing the least surprising ideas. Instead, I suggest we explore the underlying dynamics of the system.

You didn't answer my question. Are there other limiting factors I don't know about? That wasn't a rhetorical question. I'm very interested to know what other possible limits we might encounter between here and Kardashev Type 1.

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You seem to have shifted from discussing energy consumption to discussing electricity consumption; perhaps you aren't aware that there's a difference. Marketed energy consumption in the US has actually increased over the last 10 years by about 15%, from about 90 EJ/year (2.9 TW) to about 105 EJ/year (3.3 TW)—again, excluding agricultural products. Only about a third of current energy consumption in the US is electrical.

The page you linked says US electrical energy consumption is only 450 GW or so, which would be under 15% of the total, but that's after the efficiency losses from electrical generation and distribution. It also points out that US electrical energy consumption has increased in 59 of the last 69 years, with a total increase of 13× during that time. Total US energy use, however, has only increased by 3× during that time; it doubled roughly from 01950 to 01970 (from about 1 TW to about 2 TW), and has increased by about 50% since then, four times slower. What might account for this slowdown?

Well, energy prices have been relatively high and volatile since 01970. Looking at the last ten years from 02011 to 02014, WTI was in the US$70–100/bbl range, although since then it's dropped below US$50 and very briefly to US$20 at the beginning of the covid pandemic. By contrast, in the 01945–01970 period before the energy crisis, it was fairly stable in the US$20–30 range (adjusted for inflation), and since then it's mostly been US$40–100. So it's unsurprising, in retrospect, that in the last 50 years there's been strong pressure to conserve energy: energy cost about four times as much, so energy use grew about four times slower.

There are places, such as Germany, that have been shifting their economic production to lower-energy-intensity sectors of the economy and higher-efficiency ways of using energy, with the consequence that their energy use has actually declined. This is partly driven by energy prices, but more by strong conservation efforts led by the Green Party, which have been critical to the current dramatic reduction in the cost of photovoltaic energy.

And precisely what we're discussing here is that solar photovoltaic energy is now dramatically cheaper than fossil-fuel sources of energy, even in some non-tropical countries like the US. And the total solar resource is, as I said, about a thousand times larger than total world marketed energy consumption. So we should expect dramatic growth in energy consumption in the next decades. Maybe not in Germany, though.

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As for your plaint about the length, that was under 1000 words! It takes literally under three minutes to read. If you think that's a lot to read, I'd hate to see how you react to a so-called book. I know this is probably hard to imagine, but I regularly spend not just three consecutive minutes reading a text written in one of these "books", but literally multiple hours. Sometimes they don't even have pie charts in bright primary colors! Terrifying, I know. But it's important, because when I read things and carefully consider them, making calculations, I find out when I'm wrong, which is very often. (So-called "research papers" are even more important, because they're more up to date, but they take longer to read even though they're shorter.) Then I change my opinion to be less wrong. I recommend trying it!

However, it does have the disadvantage that it forces me to abandon popular beliefs that can't possibly be correct in favor of "crazy" ones that are backed up by evidence and reasoning. Sometimes, to my surprise, the popular beliefs turn out to have been correct after all. More often reality turns out to have been just as crazy as I thought.

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So, I don't know what will happen over the next 30 years, but I think a 100× increase in world marketed energy consumption due to PV is eminently plausible. Maybe it'll only be 3×, maybe 1000×. Maybe there will be another world war, worse than the last two, and world marketed energy consumption will drop 10×. But it is not plausible that things will continue as they have for the last 50 years.