If consumption remains at the 2010 level, they will have accounted for 35% of electricity needs.
Today, solar energy contributes about a tenth of a percent (0.1%) of the U.S.'s electricity needs.
Tokelau has become the first territory able to meet all its electricity needs with solar power, officials say.
Ayrshire Power estimates that the new plant could meet the electricity needs of up to three million homes.
In the right location, a 10-kilowatt turbine could supply the entire electricity needs of an average American household.
It said the scheme could still generate 5% of the UK's electricity needs, or enough to power 3.4m homes.
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Ministers have set a target to see the equivalent of 100% of Scotland's electricity needs coming from renewables by 2020.
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For example, Latvia operates two major hydro-electric plants on the Daugava River which provide only half of Latvia's electricity needs.
Twenty percent of its electricity needs come from wind -- a significantly higher proportion than any other country in the world.
The state could meet up to 17 percent of its total electricity needs via wind, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
With 486 billion tons of extractable coal, the U.S. has enough supply to meet its electricity needs for the next 500 years.
While reliance on Russian natural gas imports is considerable, Poland actually relies on domestically produced coal for nearly all of its electricity needs.
Businesses have to rely heavily on fuel-guzzling generators to meet their electricity needs and this substantially increases the costs of doing business in the country.
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Egyptian natural-gas supplies generate 20% to 25% of Israel's electricity needs.
The amount generated also represented 39% of Scotland's total electricity needs.
The top importer is Japan, but even it only imports some 113 million tonnes annually and relies on coal for less than 30% of its electricity needs.
The new nuclear power station will provide only a fraction of Pakistan's growing electricity needs, but supporters of the country's nuclear programme say nuclear power is the answer to increasing electricity demands.
"From tidal barrages you can reasonably expect you can get 15% of UK electricity needs, that's a very solid number, " co-author Dr Nicholas Yates from the National Oceanography Centre told BBC News.
Maf Smith, chief executive of green energy trade body Scottish Renewables welcomed the move and said that with the right support wave and tidal power could meet 10% of Scotland's electricity needs by 2020.
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There it will go to a Shell refinery, then be channeled to two 500-MW facilities and a 1, 200-MW plant, which together will produce roughly a fifth of the country's projected electricity needs by that time.
And consider the electricity that needs to be generated to move and heat all that water.
And China, with its increasingly wealthy population buying cars and using ever more electricity, needs guaranteed energy security.
California, for instance, has more than 7, 000 wind turbines (admittedly most of them the little, old ones), yet they produce only about 1.5% of the electricity the state needs.
Supermarket giant Tesco has recently been given a green light to build Britain's first ever straw-powered Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant to meet the electricity and heating needs of one of its distribution centres.
They have fundamental growth behind them because the emergent middle class needs the electricity.
It provides roughly 50% of the U.S. electricity sector's needs--even with the "going green" craze at full throttle, power companies aren't going to stop gobbling up coal.
We also spotted this ingenious wood speaker system that amplifies music using the properties of the material it's made of and needs no electricity at all.
He also says that if we manage to hijack the molecules responsible for photosynthesis in plants and use them to generate electricity for our own needs it becomes a great, disruptive new step in the way we generate solar power in general.
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Solar panels produce electricity in DC, which needs to transform into AC for feeding the electric grid or for using the power onsite.
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