Area Required To Power Planet From Solar Panels

For rooftop solar power plants however area is a significant constraints in most cases for both residential and commercial rooftop solar power plants.

Area required to power planet from solar panels.

Dividing the global yearly demand by 400 kw h per square meter 198 721 800 000 000 400 and we arrive at 496 804 500 000 square meters or 496 805 square kilometers 191 817 square miles as the area required to power the world with solar panels. 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. The simple thumb rule is high efficiency solar panels will require less area for the same mw capacity than lower efficiency panels. That depends on the amount of kw of mw you would like to accommodate.

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. The extent of roof area required by a solar pv plant is dependent on two factors. Plugging these number in the above equation we get.

Thus for a terawatt after doing some math it will require about 7 800 square miles. Hence the area required per mw is if interest but not of great concern. 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. 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.

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. 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. This is about the size of a country like israel or slovenia and larger than the area of some other countries. 1000 watts total area x 1000 watts m 2 x 0 18.

This is roughly equal to the area of spain. Extrapolating this a 1 mw solar pv power plant should require about 100000 sqft about 2 5 acres or 1 hectare.