Solar Panels The Size Of West Virginia Needed To Power US
The US electricity demand for 2025 will be about 4,200 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year as of 2025. It would take a solar panel the size of West Virginia to provide that amount of solar as the only source of electricity. This is the number for “typical” sunlight. If nothing blocked the Sun, that future would fall by about half.
Solar currently provides about 3.5% of the energy needed to create electricity. Building solar panels with no space between them is an unrealistic expectation. However, if solar is ever to get to a point where it provides 10% of US electricity, panels would need to take up a huge number of square miles. There are approximately 1,100 square miles of installed solar panels today.
Cost Of Hardware
The data points to the large infrastructure it would take to make solar a major electricity provider. This comes in three parts. One is labor. The next is the cost of hardware. The final one is leasing or buying property.
Solar powering the US is in trouble because of the Trump Administration. This may block the growth of solar to an usually high degree. There may be no needs for those thousand of square miles soon,
