꧁༺(Sunny) Ella ༻꧂

How much of NYC would you need to cover in solar panels to turn it into a net exporter of electricity? NYC uses about 50 TWh of electricity per year. NYC has ~780 square kilometers of land area, and a GHI of 4 kWh/m^2/day, giving a primary solar resource of ~1,100 TWh/year - more than 20x electricity demand. Let's assume we only place panels over existing impervious surfaces on buildings and parking lots. (the impervious part of the first 45.5%) That brings our area to 261 sq km and our solar resource to 380 TWh/year. With 23% efficient panels and 14% system losses (for dust, inverter losses, etc.) we get 75 TWh/year. We would need to cover ~2/3 of the impervious surfaces in the "buildings & lots" category to generate as much electricity as NYC consumes. This leaves open all existing sidewalks, streets, parks, vacant land, airports, etc. and doesn't include any vertical surfaces which could allow for capture of a larger fraction of NYC's primary solar resource. The power density of solar PV is high enough to turn the densest city in the U.S. into an exporter of electricity.