How Many Solar Panels To Power Usa

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.

How many solar panels to power usa.

There are over 1 47 million solar panels in use across the contiguous 48 states according to satellite machine learning from researchers at stanford. Map courtesy of google maps. This is derived from the fact that every year the u. American solar power offsets over 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year which is like planting almost 1 2 billion trees.

767 762 000 000 watts 250 watts per panel 3 071 048 000 total panels. 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. Obviously wind energy wouldn t be the only form of primary energy in the usa.

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. I chose a 250 watt sharp nd 250qcs solar panel made in the usa 65 x39 each. 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.

The yellow square is approximately 21 000 square miles.