How much area would renewable energy require?

Many people believe that we must use either fossil fuels or nuclear power for energy production, because renewable energy (solar, wind) takes up far too much land area.

For instance, consider Ivanpah’s Land Footprint: World’s Largest Thermal Project Requires 92 Times the Acreage of Babcock & Wilcox “Twin Pack”, by Ben Heard, 3/13/2014, The BreakThrough

The author points out that the land footprint of a solar power plant is 92 times larger than the land footprint of a small nuclear reactor.  He thus concludes that we need nuclear fission power, not solar.

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PWR_nuclear_power_plant_diagram.svg

Although I certainly agree that there are safe ways to generate power from nuclear fusion, the case against solar and wind power is overstated and doesn’t hold up to close analysis.

It turns out that the power needs of the entire United States could be filled by renewable energy that uses less than 1% of land area in the nation.

Further, that land could even be dual-purpose.

There are many places where people grow crops under and between solar panels or wind turbines.

GIF created by Ssgxnh for Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAWT_and_VAWTs_in_operation_medium.gif

Prof. Katharine Hayhoe writes

People worry about how much land we’d need to supply the US with clean energy.

Well, @elonmusk and I have independently calculated it and we both come up with something roughly comparable to the area we currently use for maple syrup or golf.

A square about 100 to 120 miles per side.

As a 🇨🇦 {Canadian} let me hasten to clarify that I’m not advocating for removing maple syrup production but rather for co-production of energy on land that is also used for farming or pollinator ecosystems 😁

For example, @FreshEnergy runs this amazing clearinghouse, The Center for Pollinators in Energy

This graphic is from Here’s How America Uses Its Land,

By Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby, Bloomberg, 7/31/2018

“Land use classifications are based on data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in a report called the Major Uses of Land in the United States (MLU). Data from the report provide total land-use acreage estimates for each state across six broad categories. Those totals are displayed per 250,000 acres.”

Ramez Naam has a similar analysis, How Much Land Would it Take to Power the US via Solar?

Guest writer Ben Heard [see above] complains that solar’s land footprint (specifically at the Ivanpah plant) is 92 times that of a small modular nuclear reactor…

What Heard’s Breakthrough Institute article doesn’t tell you is how tiny that land footprint, in the grand scheme of things, actually is.

Do the math on the numbers he presents:

1087 Gwh / yr, or 0.31 Gwh / acre / year.

Gigawatt hours, abbreviated as GWh, is a unit of energy

It = one billion (1 000 000 000) watt hours = one million kilowatt hours

At that output, to meet the US electricity demand of 3.7 million Gwh per year, you’d need about 48,000 square kilometers of solar sites. (That’s total area, not just area of panels.)

That may sound like a stunningly large area, and in some sense, it is. But it’s less than half the size of the Mojave desert.

And more importantly, the continental United States has a land area of 7.6 million square kilometers.

So to meet US electrical demand … would require just 0.6 percent of the land area of the continental US.

Asked about this on Twitter, Heard replied that larger size nevertheless is a disadvantage. It threatens ecosystems and endangered species, for instance.

And this is a legitimate point, in some specific areas. (Though certainly far less so than coal and natural gas.)

But, for context, agriculture uses roughly 30% of all land in the United States, or 50 times as much land as would be needed to meet US electricity needs via solar.