AN: The Mojave Desert is about 50,000 square miles.

Say you need 50 square miles for 1.5 million people. You’d need about 1500 square miles to power the entire state of CA by your calculation, which is 3% of the area of the desert or 1% that of the entire state of California.

Actually, for homes alone, your calculation is a bit off base, since average household size is about 2.5 people, which translates to about 550-560k homes in San Diego. But with industrial use and the metro area, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

You’re also not talking rooftops into account. 40 million people / 2.5 = 16 million homes at say 500 sf of roof area per person. I’m lowballing this to account for people living in multi-story apartment buildings, where the roof area is shared between multiple apartments in a line.

That’s 8 billion sf of roof area for residential alone in the state of California or 286 square miles. Probably double that if you count commercial and industrial spaces.