Have you ever wondered how many square miles of solar installations it would take to power the entire United States? The answer may be smaller than you think.
An intriguing video by Solar City shared on the GOOD website in April 2016 takes viewers for a quick tour of what it would take to electrify the entire United States on solar energy alone. The map-based visual is surprising, depicting just three relatively modest-sized plots of land. We’re a long way from that level of deployment, but we’ve come far in a short time.
In 2015, 0.6% of utility generation in the U.S. came from solar. To increase that number to 100%, we would need to produce 4 million gigawatt-hours (GWh) of solar energy annually. To produce 1 GWh of solar power, you need approximately 2.8 acres of land—or roughly 11.2 million acres (17,500 square miles) to generate 4 million GWh of clean energy. By these calculations, it would only take 0.6% of the total surface area of the continental United States to power the entire country with renewable solar power. That’s right, less than 1%.
U.S. solar energy production continues to increase steadily. In 2016, the amount of power contributed by solar rose to 0.9% of U.S. electricity generation at utility-scale facilities, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). In June, the EIA said that for the first time in March, wind and solar accounted for more than 10% of utility electricity generation in the U.S. during a single month.
But even that milestone represents a very conservative number. Keep in mind that it does not include the many thousands of gigawatt-hours generated by the distributed solar assets deployed across more than a million rooftops and ground-mount solar installations.
Echoing the information shown in the SolarCity video, Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes that not only is it theoretically possible to power the entire country but that this vision is achievable with less land than then we think. In July, he reminded more than 30 state governors at the National Governors Association meeting how much real-estate is needed to make sure America can run completely on solar energy.
“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah,” he explained. “You only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States…. The batteries you [would] need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”
That’s just 101 square miles, or as Elon says, “a little square on the U.S. map.” To put this into perspective, that’s about 10% of the 1045 square-mile area of Rhode Island, the smallest U.S. state—although admittedly the desert Southwest has better insolation than New England.
While these calculations are admittedly of the back-of-the-envelope variety, Elon’s figures do take into account the element of battery storage, the game-changing option that has seen rapid market growth and opened many minds about the long-term potential for pairing solar and storage in the industry. What his grand vision may not be considering is the net battery capacity necessary to provide power 24/7 for a few days should the need arise as well as the operations and maintenance necessary to keep the system running smoothly. Let’s not forget the additional land needed to incorporate things like service roads, operational facilities and transmission lines either.
Elon isn’t really suggesting that we build a multi-terawatt-scale solar array in one place. For cost, weather, logistical, infrastructure and other reasons, such a project would not be feasible. But his thought experiment shows just how much power generation we can get from the mightiest energy source of all, using relatively small amounts of land and many billions of PV panels.
While we love to see solar installations of all sizes come online, we wish the road to building a brilliant tomorrow were faster and less expensive. But no one ever said kissing fossil fuels goodbye would be easy. The burgeoning interest and investment in renewables speak for themselves. With more big companies, utilities, small businesses, universities, government entities, communities, and, of course, homeowners getting on board, a wide variety of people understand the compelling economic and environmental benefits of solar.
If every person who is now benefiting directly from solar power stood side by side, I wonder how long the line would be? Then again, that line just keeps growing every day.
By Heather Dixon, marketing coordinator, Inovateus Solar
