How many solar panels are needed to power the globe?

Here’s something to ponder. How many solar panels would be needed to power the whole world? Somebody’s gone to the trouble to work in out: 336,375 square kilometres worth would just about have done it in 2008.

By 2030, the projection is that we’ll need enough panels to cover 406,805 square kilometres. You can see what that looks like here. We don’t know who worked this out or if it is actually correct, but it’s an interesting idea.

To try to put those figures in perspective, Sydney covers 1788 square kilometres, Ballarat’s built up area covers 75 square kilometres, and South East Queensland (including Sunshine Coast down to the Gold Coast and west to the Lockyer Valley) is 22,420 square kilometres.

So, in 2008 the whole planet would have needed 16 times the area of south east Queensland to be covered in panels.

Of course, the calculation is not that straightforward, because urban areas are made up of a lot more than roofs and not all roof space is suitable for solar panels.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.