Rooftops near the equator, however, usually only vary in generation potential by around 1% across the seasons, as sunshine is much more consistent. Generally, rooftops located in higher latitudes such as in northern Europe or Canada can vary by as much as 40% in their generation potential across the year, due to big differences in sunshine between winter and summer. We then calculated electricity generation potentials from these rooftops by looking at their location. This estimated how much energy could be produced from the 0.2 million km of rooftops present on that land, an area roughly the same size as the U.K. We designed a program that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analyzed 130 million km of land - almost the entire land surface area of the planet. We found that we would only need 50 percent of the world's rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world's yearly needs. Our study is the first to provide such a detailed map of global rooftop solar potential, assessing rooftop area and sunlight cover at scales all the way from cities to continents. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we'd need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world - and where we'd need to put them.
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