So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so w

So a panel is about 261 KWh per year per square meter. We need about 25PWh, so that is about 100.000km2 of solar panel. There's lots of desert in the U.S., so we could sacrifice one of them and cover it with solar panels, and cover all of our needs. Note that a solar farms come in at around 120 million USD per square KM, that would be about 12 trillion dollars. (And those are largely the expensive import-raw-materials-from-abroad kind of dollars, not the cheap give-jobs-to-americans dollars). I suppose you could make it part of the wall with mexico to share some construction costs. So yeah the US has enough area to solar power the US a couple hundred times over (not a couple million). What I meant by that we can't reduce energy consumption enough is that even without our electricity costs, and reducing transport costs etc, there are still petawatts of power spent on services we have no direct control over but that make our lives easy, healthy and comfortable.