How Much Solar Panels To Power Usa

The yellow square is approximately 21 000 square miles.

How much solar panels to power usa.

How much money for solar panels. About 7 86 billion solar panels would be needed to power the u s. Installations have grown 35 fold to an estimated 62 5 gigawatts gw today. There s 1 8 billion acres of land in the usa so about 0 6 of our land is all it would take.

In this report nrel states that about 3 4 acres of solar panels are required to generate one gigawatt hour of electricity over the course of one year. Solar panels usually produce between 250 and 400 watts of power. 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. So you re saying it would only take 0 6 of the surface area of the continental united states to power the entire country with renewable solar power.

Just 11 200 000 acres to generate 4 000 000. How much money would it be to power the united states of america on solar energy. The actual output you see depends on factors like shading orientation and sun hours. Answers based on 2012.

This is enough capacity to power the equivalent of 12 million average american homes 1. How much are 21 250 square miles. 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. Solar would have to produce about 4 million gwh of electricity annually to provide enough energy to power the entire usa.

3 071 048 000 total panels 250 watt sharp nd 250qcs solar panel made in the usa 65 x39 each 3 071 048 000 total panels 767 762 000 000 watts. Map courtesy of google maps. Consumes around 4000 billion kwh of electricity. To put this into context 1 petawatt equals about 1 billion million watts.

Requires about 4 petawatts of electricityover one year to run life as normal. This means an astounding consumption of 12 000 kwh per year per capita.