The Required Land Area for Installing a Photovoltaic Power Plant

Till now the conversion efficiency of the commercial photovoltaic (PV) solar modules is in the range of 14 to 20%. Therefore, PV power plants need very large area to achieve the desired output power. This paper presents some proper calculations to estimate land area occupied by the PV array. Calculations for the minimum and the maximum land area for a range of PV array with power capacity from 1 to 250 kW for different latitudes in the northern hemisphere were presented. Six different PV modules were selected for the calculation. A group of correlations are presented to roughly estimate both the land area and the number of PV modules per row as a function of the total power capacity required. In addition, correlations suggested to calculate the spacing between the rows in the PV array as a function of local latitude.