General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The total area of solar panels it would take to power the world, Europe, and Germany [View all]Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)They're scattered through probably hundreds of journal articles and books all over the place.
You find a map of 'insolation' values for parts of the world, that show just how much solar energy is hitting a given area.
Then you find the amount of that energy able to be captured by solar panels of a given size.
Then you find a listing of the amount of energy actually being used in the world (or, be lazy and simply find out how much energy is being used solely in the US, for instance, and then extrapolate that out across the total population of the world - that will give you an incredibly overlarge value, since we use far more power per person than pretty much any other country out there.)
Do the math to determine how many panels it will take to generate that amount of energy, and then calculate how much total area would have to be covered by that many panels.
You'll wind up with a 'box' of roughly that size in that part of the world.
Now, the legitimate nitpicks that could be offered up is that transmission losses would be enormous if we merely put all of the panels in one place in the world, and thus we need to place the panels all over the world to avoid such losses. And thus, you'll need to cover more area, because most parts of the world don't receive the same amount of insolation as cloudless deserts do.
On the other hand, I'm willing to bet if we added up all of the area in the world covered by rooftops, it would add up to a box of roughly the same size, if not even larger.