It seems that we’re living in a technology revolution that has no signs of stopping. Each day new advancements are being made in a variety of industries. One of these is the energy industry. Greenshine New Energy, a California-based company that specializes in development and manufacturing of solar powered lighting systems, recently published a new article that asks a good what-if question: What if entire states were solar panels (or filled with solar panels)? What could that power? How much energy could that generate. With the help of a great series of graphics, they got to the bottom of those questions.
Here are some of their findings:
First off, each state could be covered in billions and billions of solar panels. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state, could fit a billion or so panels within their borders. The largest state, Alaska, could fit around one trillion solar panels. That’s a whole lot of panels.
As far the energy each state could produce, it’s also in the billions or trillions of kilowatts. They crunched the numbers on one day of energy generation (according to them, that averages around 4 hours each day). In just one day, Alaska could produce over 1 trillion kilowatts. Texas could produce about 450 billion and California could produce 274 billion.
But what does that mean, exactly? The next part of the study made some comparisons and visualizations on what those numbers mean in the real world.
First, Greenshine New Energy found a country that each state could power for a year based on those energy production numbers of a single day. The results are pretty eye opening. Alaska with their 1 trillion kilowatts of hypothetical production could power Russia for an entire year. Texas could power France and California could power Saudi Arabia.
Next, the dove even deeper to find “everyday” things to compare. So, for example, they found that Texas could power Dallas Cowboys Stadium (Jerryworld) for 45,098,510 games in just one day of solar production. In perhaps the most amusing comparison, they found that California could power the Back to the Future DeLorean for 227,150 time travels.
While we might be just a little ways off from a time-traveling DeLorean (“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”), it’s impressive to see what solar power could achieve. We won’t get to the point where states are completely covered, but with more solar farms and adding solar panels to existing buildings, we can increase the amount of energy produced by this abundant source of renewable energy.