How Much Land Do Solar Panels Take Up

How much land would it take to power the usa with solar energy.

How much land do solar panels take up.

Solar would have to produce about 4 million gwh of electricity annually to provide enough energy to power the entire usa. A large fixed tilt photovoltaic pv plant that generates 1 gigawatt hour per year requires on average 2 8 acres for the solar panels. To supply 100 of the entire nation s electricity needs in 2050 with solar it would take 12 741 square miles. A simple rule of thumb is to take 100 sqft for every 1kw of solar panels.

Map courtesy of google maps. 2 8 acres per 1gwh. This means that a solar power plant that provides all of the electricity for 1 000 homes would require 32 acres of land. This means that for a 1mw solar pv power plant the area required is about 2 5 acres or 100 000 square feet.

Consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year we d need about 13 600 000 acres or 21 250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the united states for a year. In other terms we can say that for each 1 kw of solar panels you need 100 sqft of an area on average. Firstly the solar panels and secondly its structure components. There s 1 8 billion acres of land in the usa so about 0 6 of our land is all it would take.

One can then make estimations for a traditional setup. Electricity demand in 2050 with solar energy would require roughly 33 000 square kilometers sq km of land. According to the mit authors powering 100 percent of estimated u s. At 2 8 acres per gwh then about 11 200 000 acres of land would give us what we need to produce the 4 000 000 gwh of solar power.

The yellow square is approximately 21 000 square miles. Extrapolating this a 1 mw solar pv power plant should require about 100000 sqft about 2 5 acres or 1 hectare. That s if we spread solar panels evenly across the entire country. The land required for a 1 mw power plant setup is around 4 acres for crystalline technology and around 4 5 5 acres for thin film technology.

That means for a 10 mw power plant 45 50 acres of land would be required. For example for a 1 mw solar power plant installation the solar farm land requirements would be around 4 acres when using a crystalline technology.