21,250 square miles per year by 2050

If the United States adopted solar as the main energy source, solar panel cleaners would have at least 21,250 square miles to clean per year. Now imagine if those panels are cleaned 2 times a year…that takes us to 42,500 square miles per year. While it is highly unlikely that the USA’s main energy source will be solar, it is possible that in the next 50 years, 30-50% is solar and that the average cleaning is once per year. 

How Much Surface Area Do We Need to Power the USA?

According to a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt-hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.

Source: https://www.freeingenergy.com/how-much-solar-would-it-take-to-power-the-u-s/