For example for a 1 mw solar power plant installation the solar farm land requirements would be around 4 acres when using a crystalline technology.
Average lifespan of a 1 mw solar panel farm.
Buying solar panels is an investment that pays you back over the period of time.
One mw is equal to one million watts.
If you were to use panels that were a higher wattage such as 320 watts you would need significantly less panels to achieve the same one mw of power.
Meanwhile that value sounds unusually low in comparison to typical costs associated with residential solar 3 to 4 dollars per watt.
Therefore you can assume that a 1 mw solar farm would cost roughly 1 million to install.
In other terms we can say that for each 1 kw of solar panels you need 100 sqft of an area on.
The economies of scale concept is in full effect in the solar industry.
Although the upfront cost may appear to be large your monthly savings on electricity bills and tax incentives surely lowers the overall cost of a solar power system installation.
It is one of the world s largest solar farms the 2 5 billion project includes 9 million cdte photovoltaic modules based on thin film technology manufactured by u s.
If you divide this one million watts by 200 watts per panel we are left with needing 5 000 solar panels to produce one mw of power.
When we use thin film technology a 1mw plant will require an average of 4 5 to 5 acres of land.
How long do they last.
The area required by thin film panels is about 50 more than that for the crystalline as the latter are about 50 more efficient than the former.