How much land does solar need to generate a megawatt hour?

How much land is required for solar? We downloaded all the data on a few dozen example, large solar projects in the US from the US EIA databases and did some math.

Calculating the average across several large solar projects in the US, it takes 2.97 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hours of electricity (GWh) per year.

Note: A GWh is the same as 1,000,000 kilowatt hours.

You can see our data and math in the spreadsheet below.

Code: m118 SolarLand math xbMath