How Many Solar Panels To Power Usa

To put this into context 1 petawatt equals about 1 billion million watts.

How many solar panels to power usa. This means an astounding consumption of 12 000 kwh per year per capita. Requires about 4 petawatts of electricityover one year to run life as normal. I chose a 250 watt sharp nd 250qcs solar panel made in the usa 65 x39 each. 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.

This is derived from the fact that every year the u. 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. 767 762 000 000 watts 250 watts per panel 3 071 048 000 total panels. The yellow square is approximately 21 000 square miles.

Consumes around 4000 billion kwh of electricity. Solar hydro geothermal and biofuels will also play roles with solar being at least equal to wind generation. Map courtesy of google maps. There are over 1 47 million solar panels in use across the contiguous 48 states according to satellite machine learning from researchers at stanford.

It is also reported that total electricity consumption for the united states during 2012 was 3 694 650 million kwh million kilowatt hours.