All We Need is Solar? #
April 7th, 2008 | In Worth Knowing
Salon’s Pablo Päster makes clear that the United States could never manage to get all it’s power needs satisfied by solar alone. It seems obvious, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d wondered.
At 12,000 kWh per capita, electricity demand is roughly 3.6 trillion kWh, or the equivalent of 1,200 coal-fired power plants running full-time. To generate 3.6 trillion kWh per year, we would need to install about 1.5 billion square meters of solar panels, or around 586 square miles. This is clearly a lot higher than the number that you had heard and equivalent to one-third of Rhode Island.