How renewable energy sources like wind, solar farms could use less land

Imagine that all 4.05 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity consumed in the United States last year were supplied by a single source of power, rather than a mixture of different technologies. This is how much land each power source would require.

If nuclear power plants generated all U.S. electricity, that would occupy 469 square miles of land, including the land for mining uranium, storing spent fuel and connecting to the electricity grid.

That's about the size of Madison County, Idaho, population 53,000.

Natural gas needs land for fracking and pipelines as well as power plants. If it generated all U.S. electricity, it would need as much land as Huerfano County, Colo.

Coal needs a lot of land for mining. If coal generated all of U.S. electricity, it would use as much land as West Virginia — aptly, a major coal state.

Solar panels’ fuel is sunlight, requiring no mines, drills or pipelines. But sunlight is often unavailable, and solar farms need more land to produce the same amount of electricity as fossil fuel-powered plants running round-the-clock.

Wind turbines require even more land than solar panels. If the United States were powered solely by onshore wind turbines, they would occupy an area larger than Montana.

Wind and solar — what many hope will be the power plants of the future — will need far more land than the power plants of the past. Where will this land come from?

Leading plans to halt climate change involve replacing natural gas and coal with solar and wind — all while doubling electricity production as cars and other fossil-powered machines are plugged in.

"We need a massive build out," said Nels Johnson, senior practice adviser for renewable energy development at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit. "It probably exceeds the interstate highway system in terms of its scale, in terms of its cost, in terms of the time it's going to take to complete."

Johnson and colleagues have just released a new study on how to reduce the amount of land needed for a project that size. They have lots of detailed proposals, but one idea underlies them all: the current way of building renewables will not work.

"If we take the business-as-usual approach, land conflicts will probably prevent us from getting to these ambitious clean energy targets," said Jason Albritton, director of the Nature Conservancy's North American climate mitigation program and one of Johnson's co-authors.

In its report, the Nature Conservancy describes two different futures in which the United States achieves net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In one future — call it "business as usual" — wind and solar farms are built haphazardly, with little consideration for land impacts. In the other future, developers use land more efficiently.

Business as usual would require 266,410 square miles — an area around the size of Texas — to fit all the solar panels and wind turbines, plus batteries to store electricity when sunlight and wind are unavailable and long-distance transmission lines to bring power from rural areas to towns and cities.

The researchers used a statistical model to discover the suite of technologies that would minimize land impacts. A smarter strategy, they found, could slash that footprint by more than half, to 114,642 square miles — a little bigger than Arizona. That's still a lot of land, but it would reduce the opportunities for conflict, the researchers said.

The model recommends building more solar and less wind, since photovoltaics produce more power with less land than turbines do. With less wind on the map, there are fewer opportunities for wind turbines and solar panels to share land, but the researchers still encourage the practice in places with abundant wind and sunlight.

The study sees rooftop solar generating far less power than large solar farms. If one in three rooftops have solar panels by 2050 — a high-end assumption — rooftop solar would contribute 15 percent of U.S. solar power, according to the researchers. "It's an important part of the picture, but it will not ever be totally sufficient," Johnson said.

The researchers also found land savings by avoiding productive farmland and instead building on abandoned fields or rehabilitated mines, landfills and hazardous waste sites known as brownfields. Last year's $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for locating clean energy projects on old mine land and brownfields.

In places where fruits and vegetables are grown, such as eastern Washington, the central valley of California, and parts of Colorado, solar panels and agriculture could share space rather than compete for it. At 24-acre Jack's Solar Garden in Boulder, Colo., 3,200 solar panels share space with tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, lettuce and more — although squash has languished under the photovoltaics. The experiment generates enough electricity to power 300 homes, according to the farm's website, but could provide a model for larger projects.

Farm owner Byron Kominek sees promise in growing crops among solar panels, but "the holy grail," he told me, is agrivoltaics on cattle ranches. The cows cherish the shade, but the trick is to have good forage under the panels so the cows stay busy eating. "If you have beat up land," Kominek said, "they’re gonna be bored and screw with your solar array."

For now, renewables are popular. A January poll from the Yale Program on Climate Communication found that most voters favor building more solar and wind. Although people are less excited about the prospect of living next to wind and solar farms, a majority even said they would support development in their own area.

Yet wind and solar have failed to win the support of conservative Republicans, who are more likely to live in the rural areas where renewable energy developers want to build. As a result, conservatives’ opposition could prove more decisive to the future of wind and solar than liberals’ support.

There are plenty of reasons — ones that have nothing to do with politics — to object to living next to a power plant. For some people, it's that wind and solar developments obstruct views and detract from their area's natural beauty. Others cite evidence that nearby wind and solar farms reduce property values. Some people have reported trouble sleeping amid the turbines’ whir.

Then there are concerns about harm to nature and wildlife. Birds and bats have perished colliding with turbine blades. Some migratory birds, such as whooping cranes, seem particularly sensitive to where wind turbines are built. Solar farms have also upset habitats, including those of the desert tortoise in the southwest and gopher tortoise in the southeast.

Opposition to solar and wind projects is already stalling development. Last year alone, 136 local governments restricted or rejected solar and wind projects, according to the Renewable Rejection Database. That included 87 locations in Ohio, where in 2021 the legislature passed a law allowing county commissioners to cancel renewable energy development.

"We have to get past this notion that there's just a bunch of bumpkins out there, and we’re going to steamroll them," said Robert Bryce, a journalist who manages the database and hosts the "Power Hungry" podcast. "Because that's what the effort is now: to steamroll these rural Americans. And they’re fighting back."

Some argue that any concerns about wind and solar pale in comparison to threat of climate change. Yet as renewables’ footprint grows, so too will the likelihood of land conflicts. Will solar and wind go the way of nuclear power — a clean-energy technology bogged down by legal battles and ceaselessly opposed by motivated citizens?

It's possible, the authors of the Nature Conservancy report told me. If renewable energy developers try to build wherever they want, if they ignore the concerns of local citizens, if they fail to offer incentives to nearby towns such as cheaper power and good jobs, the backlash could thwart the renewable energy industry.

"We’re seeing the opposition," Albritton said. "Just coming and building a project and assuming the community will be supportive is not going to be an approach that works."

I calculated the areas required to power the United States with each type of power using data from Our World in Data and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. For more information on the calculations and assumptions used, see this computational notebook.

The Nature Conservancy provided me the geospatial data to produce the maps showing projected renewable energy footprints in 2050. My code to produce the maps, as well as information and caveats about those data, can be found in this notebook.

Lastly, the code and data for the chart of polling results is in this notebook, and the code and data for the chart showing renewable rejections is in this notebook.

You can use the code and data to produce your own analyses and charts — and to make sure mine are accurate. If you do, email me at [email protected], and I might share your work in a future column.

Clarification: In an earlier version of this column, I wrote that the United States consumed 462 billion watts of electricity last year. That's a mathematically accurate conversion from 4.05 trillion kilowatt-hours, the number provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, some readers pointed out that the kilowatt-hour, not the watt, is the appropriate unit to express energy usage over a period of time, so I updated the article to use kilowatt-hours.