Your rule of thumb is fine. That's roughly how much large-scale solar farms built a few years ago are producing over the course of a year in the California dese

Your rule of thumb is fine. That's roughly how much large-scale solar farms built a few years ago are producing over the course of a year in the California desert. As module efficiency goes up the number will trend up a bit over time in desert locations, but as costs fall more farms will be installed in less-sunny locations as well. Unlike my sibling poster, I don't expect solar thermal to do significantly better on areal efficiency. The captured-sun-to-electricity efficiency can be higher, but the mirrors need to be spread out more than PV modules need to be separated. Ivanpah covers 14.2 km^2 and generated 719398 MWh in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility Annualized, that's (719398 / (24 * 365)) / (14.2 * 1000 * 1000) * 1000000 = 5.8 watts/m^2. Solar PV farms in a similar climate are doing significantly better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm Desert Sunlight's annualized generation was, using the wiki data again, (1346282 / (24 * 365)) / (16.0 * 1000 * 1000) * 1000000 = 9.6 watts/m^2. I know that Ivanpah has been troubled. I'd welcome annualized areal power figures from a better-performing solar thermal generating project if anyone has them.