A Solar UK!

After reading this article today, I pondered about the UK's solar energy market. And I pondered about how many solar panels you'd need to fulfil the entirity of the UK's electricity consumption requirements.

A case of some simple googling and some simple maths, I thought!   And I was right, I worked it out.... here's how I did it...  Brain in gear?  Then let's start....

Begin with the known quantities, which are the solar panels we have on our roof. Our solar panels have an area of 10.08 square metres (measured) , and generate 1800kWh per year (measured) from 1567 hours of sunshine per year (average stats over 30 years from Met office).

So, 1 square metre of our solar panels generates 1800 / 1567 / 10.08 = 0.114 kW per square metre.

I thought I'd go for a best case scenario, and googled which city in the world has the most hours of sunlight per year. It happens to be Yuma, in Arizona, USA, right on the border of Mexico. They have an average of 4015 hours of sunlight per year.

So in one year, our solar panels in Yuma would generate 0.114 x 4015 = 457.54kW per square metre. To get the numbers into more of a sensible format, this converts to 457,540 MW per square kilometre (1,000,000 square metres in a square kilometre, 1,000kW in a MW).

I then googled how much electricity the UK uses in a year. The most recent data is from 2008, and it is 344,700,000 MWh per year.

So, by dividing the total energy requirements by the amount generated per square kilometre, this gives us how many square kilometres we'd need to generate that much.

It comes out at: 344,700,000 / 457,540 = 753.37 square kilometres.

So, to generate enough electricity to power the whole of the UK, you need 753.37 square kilometres in Yuma, Arizona. To get this many square kilometres, you need a square about 27 km along each side (about 17 miles).

That's about the size of the Greater Manchester area.  Here it is on a map:

Here it is shown next to Yuma on the US map:

There it is. The red square. East coast, just above the long thin stretch of water (Gulf of California). A solar farm that big would provide enough electricity for the whole of the UK.

And now for the final crunch - how many solar panels would that be?  Well, each of our panels is 1.26 square metres. I'll do the maths - it's just under 598 million. (597,918,059 panels to be precise).

And at about £200 per panel, (here) that works out at £119,583,611,737 - lets round it up to a nice round £200 billion.

At current consumer electricity prices of about £150 per Megawatt hour, the UK has a total spend on electricity of 344,700,000 MWh x £150 = £51,705,000,000. Lets round it up to £52 billion.

So, just less than four year's worth of electricity would pay for enough solar panels to power the whole country for ever (well, not quite, but you get the idea...!)

Although this is just a thought experiment (1; I know you couldn't transport all that energy from Yuma to the UK and 2; you'd need about two and a half times this area to do it in the UK due to the lower levels of yearly sunshine) it does put solar energy into perspective.

I believe these figures show, far from being pie in the sky, rooftop solar panels could very feasibly generate enough electricity to power the entire country (and yes I know with solar comes some not insignificant energy storage requirements to smooth out the supply/demand discrepancies).

The feed-in tariff incentives to retrofit panels to existing property are an excellent start - what we need now are regulations forcing new builds to fit panels as standard, and we will be going a very long way to easing, if not completely satisfying the forthcoming energy 'crunch' over the next decade as the old nuclear plants are phased out.

Roll on the democratisation of energy!

AND YOU DON'T NEED TO FRACK AN EFFING SQUARE INCH.

Just sayin'