Rooftop solar panels are up to 79% cheaper than they were in 2010. These plummeting costs have made rooftop solar photovoltaics even more...
Rooftop solar panels are up to 79% cheaper than they were in 2010. These plummeting costs have made rooftop solar photovoltaics even more attractive to households and businesses who want to reduce their reliance on electricity grids while reducing their carbon footprints.
But are there enough rooftop surfaces for this technology to generate affordable, low-carbon energy for everyone who needs it? After all, it is not just people who own their own houses and want to cut their bills who are in need of solutions like this. Around 800 million people globally go without proper access to electricity.
Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we would need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world – and where we would need to put them. 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.
We found that we would only need 50% of the world’s rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world’s yearly needs.
Method
We designed a programme that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analysed 130 million square km of land – almost the entire...
