Current solar panels can only capture 20 percent of the sun s energy and to become a viable wide scale source of energy for the world they would need to capture much more than that.
How many solar panels power the world.
Put another way this is the equivalent of a solar power plant that covers 115 625 square miles.
By the end of 2019 a cumulative amount of 629 gw of solar power was installed throughout the world.
How do we arrive at this number.
It would take 51 4 billion 350w solar panels to power the world.
Here we are supposing a panel size of 350w for the calculated size of 18tw of solar plants.
We receive a staggering 1 74 10 17 watts of energy from it.
To put this into perspective this is about 10 000 times more than what humans need.