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No, 1MW/7.3 acres is about INSTALLED CAPACITY, that is, peak power. https://solarindustrymag.com/nrel-report-highlights-land-use-requirements-for-solar-plants h

by anovikov 11mo ago

No, 1MW/7.3 acres is about INSTALLED CAPACITY, that is, peak power. https://solarindustrymag.com/nrel-report-highlights-land-use-requirements-for-solar-plants https://solarindustrymag.com/nrel-report-highlights-land-use... >For direct land use requirements, the capacity-weighted average is 7.3 acres per MW, with 40% of power plants within 6 and 8 acres per MW. And no, 280 GWh was literally a week ago: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=week&year=2025&week=48 https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&... So we need to consume 10 TWH a week (consumption particularly for week 48, same one), and we produce 280 GWh with 100+ GW of installed capacity. Which means, we need 35x if only power is concerned, and 205x if all energy is concerned, not just electricity.

ben_w 11mo ago
> No, 1MW/7.3 acres is about INSTALLED CAPACITY, One thing I find useful is doing the maths to see if an answer is plausible. Yours wasn't, and lo and behold I found this pretty quickly, directly debunking your citation: Those relying on the earlier benchmarks published nearly a decade ago are, thus, significantly overstating the land requirements of utility-scale PV. - https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee-land-requirements-for-utility-scale-pv.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee... And even with the changes since then, they waste a lot of land they don't strictly need to waste; see all the gaps in the image of Copper Mountain in Fig. 2. of that PDF. The reason for this difference is historical: PV modules themselves used to be the expensive part of a solar farm, not the land itself, so the early ones wasted a lot of land to put a small number of PV modules in the best possible position. The correct orientation today is "nobody cares" because they're so cheap (the only industrial scale thing I've found cheaper per square meter than PV is a very thin layer of cement, and even then I have to discard labour costs, but that's not important). This is also why quite a few of the Chinese ones are now artistic with their patterns, e.g. this: https://news.cgtn.com/news/334d6a4e7a557a6333566d54/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/334d6a4e7a557a6333566d54/index.ht... (One of the startups whose pitches I heard over the summer was a place that realised the cheapest in a lot of cases was just lay the panels flat). > And no, 280 GWh was literally a week ago TY

ben_w 11mo ago

> No, 1MW/7.3 acres is about INSTALLED CAPACITY, One thing I find useful is doing the maths to see if an answer is plausible. Yours wasn't, and lo and behold I found this pretty quickly, directly debunking your citation: Those relying on the earlier benchmarks published nearly a decade ago are, thus, significantly overstating the land requirements of utility-scale PV. - https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee-land-requirements-for-utility-scale-pv.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee... And even with the changes since then, they waste a lot of land they don't strictly need to waste; see all the gaps in the image of Copper Mountain in Fig. 2. of that PDF. The reason for this difference is historical: PV modules themselves used to be the expensive part of a solar farm, not the land itself, so the early ones wasted a lot of land to put a small number of PV modules in the best possible position. The correct orientation today is "nobody cares" because they're so cheap (the only industrial scale thing I've found cheaper per square meter than PV is a very thin layer of cement, and even then I have to discard labour costs, but that's not important). This is also why quite a few of the Chinese ones are now artistic with their patterns, e.g. this: https://news.cgtn.com/news/334d6a4e7a557a6333566d54/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/334d6a4e7a557a6333566d54/index.ht... (One of the startups whose pitches I heard over the summer was a place that realised the cheapest in a lot of cases was just lay the panels flat). > And no, 280 GWh was literally a week ago TY