Nøland, Auxepaules, Rousset, Perney and Falletti (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Grenoble INP); published in Scientific Reports (Springer Nature)

Power density of electricity generation (Nøland et al. 2022)

Mean power generated per square metre (watts per square metre) by nuclear plants including their safety area, hydroelectric reservoirs, concentrating solar, ground-mounted and floating solar farms, wave and tidal farms, geothermal fields including the area between wells, offshore and onshore wind farms (the whole area inside the farm's perimeter), and rooftop solar per square metre of roof, from the authors' measurements of 8 to 451 sites per source worldwide (Table 16). Each source gives the median, the mean and the standard deviation across sites. The land boundaries differ from Lovering et al. (2022): nuclear includes the security zone but not uranium mining, and wind counts the whole farm area.

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Numbers published from it

Power generated per square metre, by way of making electricity (Nøland et al. 2022)

Licence and credit

Licence: CC BY 4.0
What the terms say: “Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.”
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Credit we give: Nøland, J. K., Auxepaules, J., Rousset, A., Perney, B. & Falletti, G. (2022). Spatial energy density of large-scale electricity generation from power sources worldwide. Scientific Reports 12, 21280. doi:10.1038/s41598-022-25341-9. CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Copy of the raw file: Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
Cite as: Nøland, J.K., Auxepaules, J., Rousset, A. et al. Spatial energy density of large-scale electricity generation from power sources worldwide. Sci Rep 12, 21280 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25341-9

Files

The published article (26 pages). Table 16 (page 20) gives the median, mean and standard deviation of mean specific power in W/m2 and of annual energy density in TWh/km2, the capacity factor and the number of sites per source; Table 7 (page 8) splits nuclear with and without the safety area, Table 9 (page 12) rooftop solar by region and Table 11 (page 14) wind by continent. 2,802,223 bytes.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25341-9.pdf

Status

Programme: Published 8 December 2022 (volume 12) as a one-off study; no update is planned.
Updates: One-off (published 2022)
Last check: Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:15:14Z)
Independent sources measuring the same thing: Land-use intensity of electricity (Lovering et al. 2022)