Acres Of Solar Panels Per Mw

Redefining its calculations nrel determines that a large fixed tilt solar pv plant requires 2 8 acres per gwh year of generation.

Acres of solar panels per mw.

A large fixed tilt photovoltaic solar power plant that produces 1 000 megawatt hours per year requires on average 2 8 acres for the solar panels. One acre is approximately 4 046 square meters so if you have an acre s worth of solar cells then you will receive about 4 046 kilowatt hours of electricity each hour or 24 276 kilowatt hours a day. On a capacity weighted basis total land requirements average out to 8 9 acres mwac and 7 3 acres mwac for direct land use. One mw is equal to one million watts.

Therefore we can say that for every acre the plant produces an average of 0 357 gwh or 357 mwh of energy per year. This means that a solar. You will expect to average 1 mw on around 5 or 6 acres and ideally the planning authority are more cooperative on saying yes to solar farms on poor quality land. Solar farms vary tremendously in size defined in terms of megawatts mw of capacity.

If you divide this one million watts by 200 watts per panel we are left with needing 5 000 solar panels to produce one mw of power. Thus a 1 mw solar power plant with crystalline panels about 18 efficiency will require about 4 acres while the same plant with thin film technology 12 efficiency will require about 6 acres. Step 4 multiply the energy you receive by the efficiency of your solar panels to discover how much usable electricity you can yield. If you were to use panels that were a higher wattage such as 320 watts you would need significantly less panels to achieve the same one mw of power.

The area required by thin film panels is about 50 more than that for the crystalline as the latter are about 50 more efficient than the former. The kind of solar farm developers want to construct ranges from one megawatt all the way up to hundreds of megawatts.