Area Required To Power Planet From Solar Panels

Panels would need to cover 191 817 sq miles 496 805 sq km of land to power the world with solar panels the equivalent to covering the whole of spain with the boards.

Area required to power planet from solar panels.

Extrapolating this a 1 mw solar pv power plant should require about 100000 sqft about 2 5 acres or 1 hectare. So very roughly if all us cars and trucks converted to electric vehicles it would take 5 3 square miles x 106 terawatt hours or 562 square miles of solar panels to power them all. For rooftop solar power plants however area is a significant constraints in most cases for both residential and commercial rooftop solar power plants. That depends on the amount of kw of mw you would like to accommodate.

I you are going to install all the panels in one line you would need a space of approximately 1 m x 5 56 m each panel having a size of 1 m x 0 556 m on your rooftop. The simple thumb rule is high efficiency solar panels will require less area for the same mw capacity than lower efficiency panels. This is roughly equal to the area of spain. A simple rule of thumb is to take 100 sqft for every 1kw of solar panels.

Total area 1 0 18 5 56 m 2. Hence the area required per mw is if interest but not of great concern. Since it takes 21 250 square miles of solar for 4 petawatt hours or 4 000 terawatt hours each terawatt hour takes about 5 3 square miles per terawatt hour. Solar capture areas would have to be distributed over a wide area to avoid the problem of cloudy days or storms or other weather events that would obscure the sun pouring down onto your energy farm.

This is about the size of a country like israel or slovenia and larger than the area of some other countries. The extent of roof area required by a solar pv plant is dependent on two factors. Thus a 1 mw solar power plant with crystalline panels about 18 efficiency will require about 4 acres while the same plant with thin film technology 12 efficiency will require about 6 acres. In case of large systems as a rule of thumb a typical solar system of 1mw capacity requires an area of 5 acres or over 200 000 square feet.

Plugging these number in the above equation we get. 1000 watts total area x 1000 watts m 2 x 0 18.