Elon Musk Says It Would Only Take 100 Miles By 100 Miles Of Solar Panels To Power The Entire U.S. —The Sun Is 'Really Reliable. It Comes Up Every Day'

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Big ideas usually come with big footprints. Elon Musk has been arguing the opposite for nearly a decade.

At the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in July 2017, the Tesla and SpaceX laid out a vision that sounded almost too simple for a room filled with policymakers. “If you wanted to power the entire U.S. with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said. “The batteries you need to store the energy, to make sure you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile. That’s it.”

“People talk about fusion and all that,” he continued. “But the sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky. It’s really reliable. It comes up every day. If it doesn’t we’ve got bigger problems.”

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At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, the message came back almost unchanged. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, “Elon and I have had these conversations before, but why don’t you tell the audience what would it take for the United States, in what geography would it take that solar field to electrify the United States? Let me ask a question: why aren’t we doing it?”

Musk answered Fink with the same scale. “So rough way is 100 miles by 100 miles—160 kilometers by 160 kilometers—of solar is enough to power the entire United States,” Musk said. “You can take a small corner of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico—obviously wouldn’t want it all in one place—but it’s a very small percentage of the area of the U.S. to generate all electricity that the U.S. uses.”

He extended the idea beyond the U.S., pointing to sparsely populated regions in Spain or Sicily as capable of powering Europe under the same framework.

When pressed on what’s holding things back, Musk pointed to economics shaped by policy. “Unfortunately, U.S. tariff barriers for solar are extremely high and this makes economics deploying solar artificially high,” Musk said. “Because China makes almost all the solar.”

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The pitch may be old, but the timing isn’t. Electricity demand in the U.S. is climbing fast, with AI and data centers leading the charge. In 2025, data center usage accounted for roughly half of the growth in electricity consumption, and that trend is expected to continue.

Solar is already scaling quickly. The U.S. added about 43 gigawatts of solar capacity last year, marking the fifth straight year it led new electricity generation. Solar paired with battery storage made up 79% of new additions, reflecting how far storage technology has come since Musk first laid out his argument in 2017.

Costs have dropped. Efficiency has improved. The math Musk described has only become more favorable.

Yet the rollout still trails what’s technically possible.

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Back in Davos, Musk shifted the conversation away from theory and toward execution. He said Tesla and SpaceX are working independently to build 100 gigawatts per year of U.S.-based solar manufacturing capacity, covering the full supply chain from raw materials to finished panels.

He estimated that ramp could take about three years and encouraged broader industry participation. Tesla has already begun hiring and planning equipment with a target of reaching that scale by the end of 2028.

He also pointed to longer-term ideas, including space-based solar, as a potential way to deliver constant power to energy-hungry AI infrastructure.

The throughline between 2017 and 2026 is hard to miss. Musk’s argument has barely changed because, in his view, the limiting factors were never land or sunlight.

They were always production, logistics, and policy.

And the simplest part of the equation still holds. The sun keeps showing up.

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