Published September 9th, 2009 by Future Atlas
Big Solar in China (Maybe)
China has plans to create a 25-square-mile photovoltaic solar farm. The array would have a two-gigawatt capacity; this could power three million homes, ABC News reports.
Of course, China has announced a lot of sustainability projects that haven’t quite panned out. Still, ABC notes that China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels, and is about to be the world’s largest wind turbine maker.
The first marker for this solar project will be whether the 30 megawatt demo is completed in the next couple of years. The full-scale project’s target for completion is 2019.
Twenty-five square miles is ambitious at the moment, but may come to be seen as just a start. The current National Geographic asserts that the entire US electricity supply could be powered by a solar farm occupying a 100-mile-by-100-mile square (10,000 sq miles). (George Johnson, “Plugging into the Sun,” National Geographic, September 2009, 39) This might seem like a lot, but, by comparison, it is less than a tenth of the acreage planted in corn alone each year.
(PV panel image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)