Area Required To Power Planet From Solar Panels

This is roughly equal to the area of spain.

Area required to power planet from solar panels. We know the required total output power is 1000 watts 10 panels x 100 watts the solar irradiance for a surface perpendicular to the sun s rays at sea level on a clear day is about 1000 watt. How much area indeed is required for solar power plants. 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. You have a rough estimate of the space required by the solar panels of your system.

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. Thus for a terawatt after doing some math it will require about 7 800 square miles. You might have heard that solar power plants require significant amounts of land to generate power. 1 kw of solar panels require approximately 100 sqft or 10 sqm when used on rooftops and in small ground mounted installations.

The extent of roof area required by a solar pv plant is dependent on two factors. For rooftop solar power plants however area is a significant constraints in most cases for both residential and commercial rooftop solar power plants. A spherical shell dyson sphere in the solar system with a radius of one astronomical unit so that the interior surface would receive the same amount of sunlight as earth does per unit solid angle would have a surface area of approximately 2 8 10 17 km 2 1 1 10 17 sq mi or about 550 million times the surface area of earth. 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.

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 area required by thin film panels is about 50 more than that for the crystalline as the latter are about 50 more efficient than the former. 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.