Footage is no problem if the price is right. It all boils down to price. There are so many existing places you can put solar: house roofs, garages, factories, even parking lots:
Cool cars + solar power = dual use at its best.
You are still going to need significant square footage, to get power. The 24/7, day-night mean for the CONUS is 7 Watts per square foot (averages Phoenix and Chicago, winter-summer, etc) so if you want a kilowatt you’ll need 150 square feet, more or less, even with 80% efficiency.
Note also that the comparison is between zinc oxide planar cells and zinc nanowire cells. What’s the comparison between the nanowire cells and Cu-Si cells or crystalline Si cells?
How much would a million-square-foot array of the new technology cost?
As an investor I read these periodic announcements with caution. Go back ten years and look up how many of these incredible breakthroughs actually worked, in practical terms.
And if you go back to 1957, we should have moon colonies, flying cars, robot lawn mowers (we have robot carpet vacs now), solar power, nuclear power too cheap to meter, and so forth.
I’ve always heard there was about 1000 watts/square meter of potential solar power at noon on the equater and between 600-800 in the U.S.
This link tends to agree.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/ManicaPiputbundit.shtml
Yes ... but I believe you'd be exposing the ends of the fibers to the sun ... so to some extent that extra square footage would be made up by making deeper solar arrays.
Making it up in volume, as it were.