Solar roofs would power planet11/21/2023 ![]() And for those in cities, panels can significantly reduce air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels for energy. For those living in remote areas, panels help top up or even replace supply from potentially unreliable local grids. Rooftop solar panels look like they’d be equally useful in areas with low population as they would be in urban centers. Europe holds the middle ground, with average costs across the continent of around 0.096 pence per kWh. Meanwhile, the costliest countries for implementing rooftop solar are the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. This is thanks to cheap panel manufacturing costs, as well as sunnier climates. Of these, Asia looks like the cheapest location to install panels, where-in countries like India and China-one kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, or approximately 48 hours of using your laptop, can be produced for just 0.05 pence. Our results highlighted three potential hotspots for rooftop solar energy generation: Asia, Europe, and North America. That means places where sunlight is more irregular require energy storage solutions-increasing electricity costs. This is important because these large variations in monthly potential can have a significant impact on the reliability of solar-powered electricity in that region. Rooftops near the equator, however, usually only vary in generation potential by around 1 percent across the seasons, as sunshine is much more consistent. Generally, rooftops located in higher latitudes such as in northern Europe or Canada can vary by as much as 40 percent in their generation potential across the year, due to big differences in sunshine between winter and summer. We then calculated electricity generation potentials from these rooftops by looking at their location. ![]() This estimated how much energy could be produced from the 0.2 million km² of rooftops present on that land, an area roughly the same size as the U.K. We designed a program that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analyzed 130 million km² of land-almost the entire land surface area of the planet. The Secret to Making Green Tech Like Solar Panels Go Mainstream We found that we would only need 50 percent of the world’s rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world’s yearly needs. Our study is the first to provide such a detailed map of global rooftop solar potential, assessing rooftop area and sunlight cover at scales all the way from cities to continents. Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we’d need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world-and where we’d need to put them.
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