How Many Solar Panels To Power The World

The current standard size of panels used in a large sized solar plant is easily over 350w.

How many solar panels to power the world.

In 2008 the world used about 474 exajoules or 132 000 terawatt hours worth of energy from all sources. How do we arrive at this number. 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. The us energy information administration s estimation of global energy consumption by 2030 is 678 quadrillion btu 198 721 800 000 000 kilowatt hours simple conversion divided by 400.

Put another way this is the equivalent of a solar power plant that covers 115 625 square miles. Global capacity for solar energy production reached 39 8. Pricing in solar is typically measured in dollars per watt w and the total wattage of your solar panels plays a significant part in the overall cost of your. Here we are supposing a panel size of 350w for the calculated size of 18tw of solar plants.

How many solar panels would it take to power the world. The potential for global solar energy has been estimated to be about 3 times that at 1600 exajoules 444 000 terawatt hours. Most home solar panels on the market today have power output ratings ranging from 250 to 400 watts with higher power ratings generally considered preferable to lower power ratings. 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.

To put this into perspective this is about 10 000 times more than what humans need. How much solar energy is used in the world. By the end of 2019 a cumulative amount of 629 gw of solar power was installed throughout the world. There are over 1 47 million solar panels in use across the contiguous 48 states according to satellite machine learning from researchers at stanford.

A total of 51 42 billion solar panels would be needed to power the entire world on solar energy. Assuming this power rating we would need to divide 2 75 tw by 350w which gives us the gigantic number of 7 85 billion 7 857 142 857 to be precise panels required. We receive a staggering 1 74 10 17 watts of energy from it.