A 3GW solar power plant takes up a lot of land. Around 360km² of land according to my AI, FWIW.
We can live with huge land areas converted to power generation, but more space efficient alternatives will be a big improvement.
We can live with huge land areas converted to power generation, but more space efficient alternatives will be a big improvement.
Since you want to produce power all day, you would take about 20% of that to account for tilt variations and day night cycles, and another 20% to factor in cell efficiency.
So with adequate storage, one square meter of solar can generate an average of 40W of continuous electrical power, 24h per day. Let's round that down to 25W to take into consideration outages and maintenance, bad weather, spacing between panels for personnel access etc.
And there you have it 1GW/25W is about 40 square km with quite generous safety factors, an order of magnitude less than your AI figures. This is still a lot of land if you replace farmland with it, but still totally negligible compared with the millions of square km of hot desert the world has available for this use.
For example, scaling this 400x, to cover for the entire US electrical consumption, is still "only" 16000 sq.km , or 3% of the area of the Great Basins desert in the US, which is one of the smallish deserts of the world compared with Sahara, Ghobi, Kalahari, Australia, Arabia etc. Of course, there is little economic sense to build such a mega-solar farm and pay the cost of energy transport. In practice, we are seeing distributed production taking the cheapest available land nearby.
Conclusion, land isn't really a constraint in the US.
Just pointing out that there are real downsides to this energy source, like all the others.
Now is not the time to stop developing energy sources.
PV provides massively more value per acre than agriculture does. If PV were seriously constrained by land costs, agriculture would be impossible.
But society is perfectly fine with having land producing $500/acre/year of hay, instead of $25,000/acre/year of PV output.
Anyway, the area issue seems not too bad. In the US as least, we have places like the Dakotas which we could turn like 70% of into a solar farm and nobody would really notice.