How Much Land Would it Take To Power The USA with Solar Energy?
How much land would it take to power the USA with solar energy? About this much. 2.8 acres per 1GWh. Solar would have to produce about 4 million GWh of electricity annually to provide enough energy to power the entire USA. At 2.8 acres per GWh, then about 11,200,000 acres of land would give us what we need to produce the 4,000,000 GWh of solar power. There’s 1.8 billion acres of land in the USA, so about 0.6% of our land is all it would take. Wait, “all it would take”? 11.2 million acres is a huge amount of land, right? Yes and no. Now I probably would not want to build an 11.2 million acre solar farm, but spread out across the whole country that’s very reasonable. If every single family home roof top in America were covered in solar panels for example that would give us about half of the energy. How so? Like this.
How much solar would it take to power the U.S.?
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. Given the U.S. 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 much are 21,250 square miles?
This may seem like an impractically large amount of land but not when you put it in perspective. 21,250 square miles is a square about 145 miles on each side . The U.S. has 3,797,000 square miles of land. Only about half a percent of that would be needed to provide enough solar energy to power the country.
Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:
How much land would it take to power the USA with solar energy? About this much. 2.8 acres per 1GWh. Solar would have to produce about 4 million GWh of electricity annually to provide enough energy to power the entire USA. At 2.8 acres per GWh, then about 11,200,000 acres of land would give us what we need to produce the 4,000,000 GWh of solar power. There’s 1.8 billion acres of land in the USA, so about 0.6% of our land is all it would take. Wait, “all it would take”? 11.2 million acres is a huge amount of land, right? Yes and no. Now I probably would not want to build an 11.2 million acre solar farm, but spread out across the whole country that’s very reasonable. If every single family home roof top in America were covered in solar panels for example that would give us about half of the energy. How so? Like this.
How much solar would it take to power the U.S.?
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. Given the U.S. 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 much are 21,250 square miles?
This may seem like an impractically large amount of land but not when you put it in perspective. 21,250 square miles is a square about 145 miles on each side . The U.S. has 3,797,000 square miles of land. Only about half a percent of that would be needed to provide enough solar energy to power the country.
Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:
- 40,223 square miles – this is the size of the land leased by the oil and gas industry (according to the US Bureau of Land Management).
- 18,500 square miles – the amount of federal land offered for lease to the oil and gas industry in 2017 alone.
- 13,000 square miles – the US land that has been impacted by coal surface mining [1]
- 33,750 square miles – this is the land set aside to grow the corn used to make ethanol, a gasoline substitute [2].
- 17,120 square miles – the estimated surface area of US roads (8.8 million lane-miles at an average 10 feet wide).
- 70,312 square miles – the total amount of US land used for lawns [3].
- 22,000 square miles – the size of the Mojave desert, located in southeast California.
- 2,200 square miles – the amount of Appalachian forests that have been cleared for mountaintop removal coal mining by 2012.
- 3,590 square miles – a best guess at how much land is used for parking lots.
