There was a four thousand acre solar panel setup in Texas that was demolished by a hail storm a month ago.
Despite the "everything in Texas is bigger" motto, worldwide 3 million doesn't sound too far fetched if a single install in Texas is already 4,000 acres.
That's surprising, I've seen lots of photos of solar farms post hail storm where there was minimal damage. Perhaps the hail is bigger in Texas (at least for that storm).
Reports put the size around that of a golf ball with some upwards of a baseball. Those larger ones definitely have the energy to wreck anything but the most resilient glass.
A similar event happened in Nebraska last year (I think). They got the plant back up and running in roughly six months, which is quite the feat given the amount of labor disposing and installing new panels involves.
Then again, six months is a very long time for a plant to be producing no power at all. Keeping these plants spread out will increase the odds of outages but will be necessary for them to become critical infrastructure.
The 437GW is accurate, but depending on how you measure the "acres" the MW/acre figures seems fairly low, they may be counting a lot of empty space on parcels that are not actually devoted to solar panels. Using estimates from Fig4 here, I'd expect roughly half as many acres as that to be occupied by actual solar panels:
Most people don't realize how much solar is getting deployed and how quickly it's grown, so the poster is most likely expecting the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, numbers in solar always seem to exceed estimates, see for example this veteran forecaster joking about the 1TW/year deployment mark:
> Reasons solar industry analysts don't want to forecast that a terawatt gets built in a year, ever:
> - axis on chart doesn't go that high
> - makes wind industry feel bad
> - can't find markets to put it all in without the number being clearly ridiculous for that specific market
We've gone from ~200 GW installed per year to ~400 GW per year.
The India mega solar farm [2] is quoted as designed to deliver 30 GW from 72,600 hectares (179,398.5 acres).
Sanity checking ( 437 / 30 ) x 179,398 gives 2.6 million acres.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat_Hybrid_Renewable_Energ...