A federal study has revealed that if Americans installed solar panels on every roof, it would supply 39% of the total power used by the U.S.

Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) used light detection and ranging (lidar) data, geographic information systems and photovoltaic (PV) generation modeling to calculate the suitability of rooftops for hosting solar panels in 128 cities nationwide, representing about 23% of U.S. buildings.

The total national potential of rooftop solar power is 1,118 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of installed capacity and 1,432 terawatt-hours (trillion watt hours or TWh) of annual energy generation. That equates to 39% of total national electric-sector sales last year.

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