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It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generated by 1 ha of solar panels
(www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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How many ha of solar panels to produce the lifetime output of a 4,000 MW Nuclear power plant? (~45 years)
Don't compare nuclear and renewables, compare both to fossil fuels and greenwashing garbage like biomass and bio ethanol.
Is bio ethanol bad?
The thing with biofuels is that they could be used to feed people instead
How many 4000MW nuclear power plants have been stood up n the last 10 years? What is their total generating wattage/dollar?
Now do the same math for solar.
4,000MW / 400w per panel = 10,000,000 panels, or about 3,444 acres of solar panels. That's about the size of a small-ish town, and 75x larger than an equivalently rated nuclear plant.
However, the initial and maintenance costs of so many solar panels are far lower than those of nuclear, or at least they were before Orange Monday.
4GW per hour, 24 hours a day would be 96GWh per day.
One statistic I found said that it takes 2.97 acres to make 1GWh of power over a year. Converting that to GWh per day per acre gives me 0.000922.
Dividing the 96GWh by 0.000922 gives me ~104,121.48 acres or ~402 sq. miles.