How much space would be needed for photovoltaic systems to meet the entire electrical needs of the United States?
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If PV were a primary energy source, what would the world look like? Would PV collectors cover every square inch of available land? Contrary to some popular notions, the landscape of a world relying on PV would be almost indistinguishable from the landscape we know today. The impact of PV on the landscape would be low, for three reasons. First, PV systems have siting advantages over other technologies; for example, PV can be put on roofs and can even be an integral part of a building, such as a skylight. Second, even ground-mounted PV collectors are efficient from the perspective of land use. Third, adequate sunlight is ubiquitous and often abundant, and present in predictable amounts almost everywhere. As we move away from fossil-fuel energy, PV will become important because of its land-use advantages:
PV's low-impact siting for flat-plate systems. In the United States, cities and residences cover about 140 million acres of land. We could supply every kilowatt-hour of our nation's current energy requirements simply by applying PV to 7% of this area-on roofs, on parking lots, along highway walls, on the sides of buildings, and in other dual-use scenarios. We wouldn't have to appropriate a single acre of new land to make PV our primary energy source!
PV's efficient ratio of produced energy to land use. Even if it isn't installed on rooftops, flat-plate PV technology is the most land-efficient means to produce renewable energy.
PV has a competitive conversion efficiency, a high capacity factor, and can be "packed" densely in a given area. We still wouldn't have a land use issue, even if we didn't use roofs for PV. We would need only 10 million acres of land - only four-tenths of one percent of the area of the United States - to supply all of our nation's energy using PV. Is that a lot of land? Not for something as important as producing electricity, and not in comparison to some of the other ways we use land.
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