How Many Solar Panels To Charge The World

Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 national renewable energy labs nrel report we know that it takes on average 3 4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year.

How many solar panels to charge the world. They undertook this research as part of their ongoing mission to educate the public about renewable energy of all kinds including solar and wind energy especially. A better approach is to look at real world data captured from real world solar arrays and just extrapolate from there. We receive a staggering 1 74 10 17 watts of energy from it. 5 hours x 290 watts an example wattage of a premium solar panel 1 450 watts hours or roughly 1 5 kilowatt hours kwh.

In the example above you would need 24 solar panels to account for 80 of your average consumption 29 6 kwh daily usage divided by 1 24 kwh per panel. Here we are supposing a panel size of 350w for the calculated size of 18tw of solar plants. The current standard size of panels used in a large sized solar plant is easily over 350w. How much energy does a solar panel produce.

In 2009 the land art generator initiative sponsored a study to determine just how many solar panels would be needed to supply the world energy demand in 2030. Anything past that number would just go towards your household appliances cooling or whatever else. For the sake of example if you are getting 5 hours of direct sunlight per day in a sunny state like california you can calculate your solar panel output this way. To put this into perspective this is about 10 000 times more than what humans need.

Thus the output for each solar panel in your array would. To get this level of solar panel output from your installation you ll need about eight 250w solar panels to generate enough juice to power your electric car every day. According to a graduate thesis by technical university of braunschweig student nadine may the number of solar panels needed to supply the entire world s energy needs would fill just 25 000 square. A total of 51 42 billion solar panels would be needed to power the entire world on solar energy.

One solar panel produces about 1 24 kwh per day. To get these numbers we used high and low panel production ratios to calculate how many solar panels are needed on average.