Quote:
Originally Posted by Blueblaze
I've shown you mine, now show me yours.
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Today it takes about 2.8 acres to produce 1 gigawatt hour of electricity. The US is expected to use 4 million gigawatt of electricity hours in 2022.
4,000,000 GWh * 2.8 acres/GWh = 11.2 million acres
or 17,500 square miles to provide all US electricity requirements
Texas is 268,000 square miles or 15 times greater than the space required!
There is about 120 million homes in the USA. If you assumed 2,000 square feet per home of roof space for solar .... that equals:
120,000,000 x 2,000 = 240 million square feet
Or 8,600 square miles.
So rooftop solar could provide 50% of the countries electricity
Of course solar only needs to supplement hydro, wind, geothermal, nuclear etc.
The efficiency of solar panels has been steadily increasing .... So the it will take even less area in the future