Watch: visualization of how many solar panels are required to power the world

23 billion sounds like a lot of panels. How big is that number?

First, a sense of proportion is needed: Every day, the world uses about 90 million barrels of oil. It takes less than 9 months to use up 23 billion barrels of oil. This has been happening for decades. So we’re already in the habit of using up 23 billion of things at a regular rate.

23 billion solar panels is about 20 years installation if we keep moving at 2020 rates [1]. The rates are climbing every year.

The solar installation industry is nowhere near mature; it really only became commercially significant around 2015. If you travelled back in time and explained to oil industry people in 1910 that one day the world would need 90 million barrels a day, it would have been taken as proof that oil would never be practical.

I work in the renewables industry, mostly around solar farms. My solar farm clients typically have around 400,000-ish panels in a farm. A few of my clients have over a million. Solar farms keep getting bigger every year as we learn more about how to economically scale up their construction and operation. The Sun Cable project in north-western Australia will have about 30 million panels in a single set of solar farms.

Even if every solar farm stayed at 400,000 panels, that’s about 57,000 solar farms, scattered around the sunny parts of the world. It sounds like a lot, but for a sense of scale: there are over 150,000 used car outlets in the US alone.

If the average solar farm size grows to 2 million panels (pretty realistic), then less than 12,000 solar farms are needed.

This graphic is also helpful [2]:

There’s going to be an environmental cost with covering up a lot of land. But there are benefits too. For example: sheep like the shade and the rain protection, so merging solar and sheep farms is pretty straightforward. That’s a part of the land-use problem solved. There is a lot of other R&D happening on the topic of dual-use for solar farm sites.

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The take-away point is: 23 billion is not a scary number when you work in the energy industry. It’s already in progress.

Footnotes:
[1] The rates are climbing every year, but it’s not clear where they’ll peak or start to taper off, so assuming a flat rate is a reasonable coarse approximation.

[2] Source: Archi-Ninja | The Surface Area Required to Power the World with Solar Panels

[3] Source: ACT solar farm announces new tender ..... for sheep | RenewEconomy

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Though residences could certainly use more solar mandates (and new developments could be designed so houses are properly oriented), I was mainly talking about commercial real estate development, which usually has a lot of surface area doing absolutely nothing. Every time I look at a city on Google maps from above, I see all this roof and parking space that could harbor a lot of solar panels.

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That’s why energy storage and management is the new hotness in the industry. Until everyone has their own huge battery at home that’s large enough to outlast days of bad weather, there’s still plenty of ways to make money in the power sector, even if a lot of the generation of power is done on the customers’ own solar cells.

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As an added benefit, we’re finding in Australia that there’s money to be made in storage from grid frequency support. When a coal-fired generator retires, you need to replace its energy input and the grid frequency stabilization the big spinning generator provided.

With power electronics, some smarts need to be programmed to make grid frequency support happen. Turns out batteries are excellent at this; better than rotating machinery in many ways, and grid frequency support earns more money for the battery-owning generator company than “buy low, sell high” arbitrage.

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And that also reduces air conditioning bills. The underside of a solar panel is a lot cooler than a sunlit rooftop. Win!

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Thanks you

Would also get rid of parking which would be a huge bonus.

Parking is the scourge of modern cities and works especially hard at undermining attempts to make them liveable.

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That’s 1200W, say 4 peak solar hours per day (most of those people who have no power now actually live in better places for solar where it could be 5-6) so 4.8kWh/day. But you’re right, probably too low once everyone wants the power consumption that Americans or at least Europeans have. But even if you double that it’s still quite doable.

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To add to that (I’m VP of engineering at a solar and storage company) the batteries needed for one of these solar farms run around 5% of the land of the solar (depending on how many hours of power you want, and what chemistry you want to use.) For example, we’ve got 120MW of solar in 9 small installations near each other in upstate NY (for economic reasons, policy reasons, and the design of the distribution system we end up making 5MW sized facilities in this state). These are all DC coupled (the batteries are on the same inverter DC bus connection as the solar.) The panels in this case are about 20,000 per site, and we’ve got four or eight 8.5x20 containers of batteries to make the solar “dispatchable”. We could double the batteries to fully replicate the function of a traditional power plant, but as the video points out by the time we build all of this out we might decide we don’t need to.

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Going car-free is definitely better for society but I was of course referring to the elevated installations that provide shade in parking lots, as the video showed. In all but a few dense and well connected cities grocery shopping for your family without a car is unfortunately not practical in the US, and it will take more than elimination of parking spots to fix that.

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Excellent! One misstatement on the GHG footprint of natural gas: it is bigger than coal because of leakage of the potent GHG methane to the atmosphere. This video only considers the footprint from burning natural gas. Because of the challenges of climate mitigation, adaptation and persistent energy poverty in the global South the world needs more than the 19 TW now consumed (in power units), likely close to 25-30 TW. See more at our book website at Authors' Related Works.

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In some ways, it’s a massive undertaking and incredibly daunting.

But when you think about how much material goes into basic housing per person, solar panels are a very small percentage.

Solar panels require manufacturing and aren’t simply extruded like drywall, but they’re trivial compared to the effort in making a car, and we have fantastic numbers of cars.

The nice map of surface area posted above also gives a good indication of how much land is really needed, and anyone who has ever seen the amount of space devoted to highway medians, airports, warehouses, water towers, and other infrastructure should realize how much space for panels is available, and already involved a big investment in materials and manufactured components. It’s big, but a small increment.

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Not to mention golf courses. Cemeteries + golf courses = all of the energy needs of the US. The Times did a really nice piece on all of the land uses in the US… it’s great for this.

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Not saying people should not be allowed to play golf… if that’s what they like. I just find that the people particularly on the right who have several arguments for “why this could never work” tend to get stopped by that one. Then they wonder if the hippies are coming for their golf clubs… “from my cold, dead, arthritic hands”

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I’ll say it then. :grimacing: Golf courses are monstrous wastes of land and water, serving a very privileged few in a massively limited way. Ban them on climate change grounds alone, not to mention all the social and neighborhood benefits we might get from losing them.

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One of the issues that we’re rapidly encountering is that while we are now in a position where we could build a future energy system that relies on renewables, we actually have to do the much harder job of building a future energy system, while ensuring that it is capable of meeting our energy needs at every point along the phase-out of fossil fuels.

Up until now, every bit of renewable energy added to the system has just displaced some fossil fuel generation, but now we’re at the point where we have to deal with energy storage and intermittency and decarbonising the difficult-to-electrify parts of the system.

And one of the things with energy storage is that it’s needed over a range of time scales- short term, storage of up to a day, medium term storage of around a week to a month, and a longer-term basis of an annual cycle. Because renewable generation tends to fluctuate on the basis of the weather and time of year, we need a range of storage solutions that will cover all of these cycles. batteries are fine for daily charge/discharge cycles but scaling up to the amount of storage required over a year is a huge stretch.

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I wouldn’t miss it.

On the rare occasions I’m asked about golf, I reply “I don’t need to play golf - I’m already boring.”

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There’s really no reason it ought to be any more difficult to build an energy storage system that can service a large portion of a renewable-energy-based grid than it would be to build (say) a modern fossil fuel power plant every time we need to replace an aging fossil fuel power plant.

Most of the underlying infrastructure we need is already here; it’s not like going full renewable means we need to build an electrical grid from scratch. We just need to gradually swap in more environmentally friendly components.

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Nah, too wild an idea even for sci-fi. Nobody would believe someone like that could ever be elected.

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