As a rule of thumb, 1 square meter receives about 1 kW of peak raw solar power when the sun is perpendicular. This should give you at least a rough magnitude of the problem instead of trusting the hallucinations of your AI.

Since you want to produce power all day, you would take about 20% of that to account for tilt variations and day night cycles, and another 20% to factor in cell efficiency.

So with adequate storage, one square meter of solar can generate an average of 40W of continuous electrical power, 24h per day. Let's round that down to 25W to take into consideration outages and maintenance, bad weather, spacing between panels for personnel access etc.

And there you have it 1GW/25W is about 40 square km with quite generous safety factors, an order of magnitude less than your AI figures. This is still a lot of land if you replace farmland with it, but still totally negligible compared with the millions of square km of hot desert the world has available for this use.

For example, scaling this 400x, to cover for the entire US electrical consumption, is still "only" 16000 sq.km , or 3% of the area of the Great Basins desert in the US, which is one of the smallish deserts of the world compared with Sahara, Ghobi, Kalahari, Australia, Arabia etc. Of course, there is little economic sense to build such a mega-solar farm and pay the cost of energy transport. In practice, we are seeing distributed production taking the cheapest available land nearby.

40% of US corn acreage is used for something like 10% of gasoline. This is an unfathomable amount of land. Solar yields 20x the amount of energy per acre. On top of that many are finding efficiencies of colocating solar with agricultural activities (agrivoltaics). And there's also replacing agricultural activities on marginal or water stressed land.

Conclusion, land isn't really a constraint in the US.

Yeah, I'm not saying solar power is impossible.

Just pointing out that there are real downsides to this energy source, like all the others.

Now is not the time to stop developing energy sources.

The space issue is obviously a bullshit red herring.

PV provides massively more value per acre than agriculture does. If PV were seriously constrained by land costs, agriculture would be impossible.

But society is perfectly fine with having land producing $500/acre/year of hay, instead of $25,000/acre/year of PV output.

Obviously there are downsides but space is something the US at least has basically unlimited amounts of.

Your AI is messing with you. 1MW requires ~6 acres, so a GW requires 6000. A square mile is 640 acres. Being generous, let's round up to 10 square miles. Times 3 and convert to square kilometers gives 78.

I don’t have any reason to doubt it, but it seems like a basically easy computation to verify or for the AI to show its work.

Anyway, the area issue seems not too bad. In the US as least, we have places like the Dakotas which we could turn like 70% of into a solar farm and nobody would really notice.

What if you include all the parking lots and warehouses and large commercial facilities in the world too?