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]wercal
(1,370 posts)So here are the numbers:
World electricity consumption - 20,000 TWh (this excludes other forms of energy...just looking at the current electrical load).
The world's largest solar farm is the Ivanpah solar farm. It has just been completed, and presumably is representative of the returns we can expect to get from a large scale solar farm. Its in the desert...not a North African desert, but a desert nonetheless - 7.4 kW h/m2/day. So let's look at it. It is rated at 1.05 TWh/year.
So...we would need 19,047 Ivanpah plants to supply the world's electrical needs. The solar field at Ivanpah is 28,000,000 square feet....around 642 acres. But Ivanpah is much bigger than that - 3,400 acres. This is because the solar panels cannot be laid adjacent to each other, like floor tiles. There has to be room to move between panels, in order to be able to clean/repair/replace panels. BTW, I suggest going to Google maps and typing in Ivanpah...from the air, it looks huge.
So, 19,047 Ivanpahs would be 64,759,800 acres....or 101,187 square miles....or something 318 miles square. Looking at the scale of the map, it looks like the box shown is very close to that.
Now looking at costs - Ivanpah costs $2.2 billion to build. Assuming no maintenance or operational costs, and a wholesale cost of power of 7 cents per KWh, Ivanpah generates $72,800,000 worth of power every year....or in 30 years, without any maintenance or operational costs (and assuming the panels last that long without needing replacement), the cost will have broken even. Of course there are operational and maintenance costs...and 40 years it probably a still a low estimate of payback period.
So it comes down to environmental benefits.