Alice Springs is in the middle of the desert though, very sunny all the time. It’s not a good place use as the average amount of energy generated for solar panels.
That’s why I added an order of magnitude to the total land area requirement
From a few seconds of googling (so the figure may be wrong), in the UK the average solar panel output per m² is 186kWh per year, about half of the NT figure.
So if everywhere was the UK, we’d need 0.6 percent of total land area.
Because we don’t have a grid that stretches from the northern to southern hemisphere, you’d need ~5 times the amount in winter (already included in the annual average figure used, but we’re looking for a very conservative estimate), so 3 percent of total land area if everywhere was the UK.
Alice Springs is in the middle of the desert though, very sunny all the time. It’s not a good place use as the average amount of energy generated for solar panels.
That’s why I added an order of magnitude to the total land area requirement
From a few seconds of googling (so the figure may be wrong), in the UK the average solar panel output per m² is 186kWh per year, about half of the NT figure.
So if everywhere was the UK, we’d need 0.6 percent of total land area.
Because we don’t have a grid that stretches from the northern to southern hemisphere, you’d need ~5 times the amount in winter (already included in the annual average figure used, but we’re looking for a very conservative estimate), so 3 percent of total land area if everywhere was the UK.