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.

How many solar panels to power usa.

I chose a 250 watt sharp nd 250qcs solar panel made in the usa 65 x39 each. Consumes around 4000 billion kwh of electricity. This is derived from the fact that every year the u. The yellow square is approximately 21 000 square miles.

767 762 000 000 watts 250 watts per panel 3 071 048 000 total panels. To put this into context 1 petawatt equals about 1 billion million watts. American solar power offsets over 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year which is like planting almost 1 2 billion trees. Solar hydro geothermal and biofuels will also play roles with solar being at least equal to wind generation.

It is also reported that total electricity consumption for the united states during 2012 was 3 694 650 million kwh million kilowatt hours. Requires about 4 petawatts of electricityover one year to run life as normal. Map courtesy of google maps. 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.

About 7 86 billion solar panels would be needed to power the u s.