The Great Land Rush

Found this article interesting. It details the amount of land that will be required to switch from fossil fuels to renewables and how the demand for that land will compete with land requirements for agricultural, residential, and commercial purposes. I firmly believe that the next gen nuclear reactors are a much better solution to energy production than solar/wind and the sheer acreage required for the latter is one reason why.

Great American Land Rush: US Needs Lots of Land for Green Energy, Housing (businessinsider.com)

Compared with traditional power plants, renewable plants with the same power-generating capacity take up a lot more land: A 2017 study found that wind farms took up 70 acres per MW while solar farms required 43 acres per MW, including all the land needed for development, power generation, transportation, and storage — 3 1/2 times to five times the land needed by fossil-fuel plants, respectively, according to the analysis. And where their fossil-fuel counterparts can operate all day long, wind and solar generators can operate between 20% and 35% of the time because of the intermittent nature of the energy sources. Wind farms, for instance, take up so much space because the blades of wind turbines are as long as the wings of a Boeing 747, and wind turbines have to be placed far enough for their blades to spin without hitting each other. Less land would be needed for power generation if the wind turbines were larger and spun faster. But while a different design would generate more power with less space, it would also kill more birds. In the United States, wind turbines are thought to kill more than 500,000 birds each year. Restrictions have been imposed on the height and speed of the turbines to lower the risk of bird death.

Given these existing technological limitations and regulations, the aggregate demand for land to power our future green economy is huge. Suppose the annual electricity demand in the United States remains at about 4 billion MWh in 2050 and the land requirement per MW does not decline. We would need 120,000 square miles, or 77 million acres, of land to install the wind and solar facilities for the energy transition. This is equivalent to the area of three-quarters of California, or two Floridas. But as the number of Americans grows and the country shifts more of its energy focus to renewable sources, there's good reason to think the need for land will also grow. Electricity demand is bound to rise significantly because of the electrification of the transportation sector and the electrification of home heating. A 2021 estimate by Bloomberg using data from researchers at Princeton University suggested that in the most extreme scenario — one where the country gets almost all its new energy from solar or wind power — the US would need to use as much as 267 million acres of land to complete its green-energy transition. That area is nearly 2 1/2 times the size of California or about 1 1/2 times the size of Texas. Under the least land-intensive scenario, the United States would still need to devote an area nearly the size of two North Carolinas, about 63 million acres, to wind and solar power to achieve our green-power goals.
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But, as with any new project, a company can't just slap down a new solar plant or wind farm anywhere it wants. For one thing, these sorts of projects require a specific type of land to be cost-efficient and useful. Ideal locations for green-power plants should be in a sunny or windy place, on cheap land, close to the final electricity consumers. But there's one crucial problem: a lot of people want that sort of land. This means green-power generators have a delicate balancing act, seeking locations that have plenty of power-generation potential and are close to urban consumers but far enough away that land costs are lower. From 2010 to 2020, the US's total wind-energy capacity increased from 39,000 MW to 119,000 MW. These new wind farms were primarily added to the South and the Midwest, parts of the country that have the right weather and the right land price. Texas and the Midwest jointly account for roughly two-thirds of our country's wind capacity. But a full green-energy transition requires a more even distribution of renewables.

With the US projected to add 79 million residents by 2060, the demand for urban and suburban housing will further increase. While the amount of urban land is a relatively small slice of the overall pie, clocking in at just over 3.6% of our total land use based on the most recent data available, it is also the fastest-growing, with the US adding roughly 1 million acres of it per year. At current rates, the amount of newly converted urban space would equal the land area of Virginia by 2050. And projections from the US Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency have suggested the shift to urban land could be even more drastic with as much as 8% of the country's land turning into urban sprawl by 2050, a shift of roughly 96 million acres, which the USDA notes "is larger than the state of Montana." Add this increase in urban space to the maximum potential area needed for green energy, and as much as 363 million acres may be transformed over the next 30 years — as little more than double the land area of Texas. Cities are already complaining about a lack of developable land and areas that were once exurban or even rural might be turned into prime real estate. As cities expand, rising land prices in these areas would further constrain the location options for green energy generators.

 

Two big ways to reduce ag land requirements

Move to more plant based diets as livestock uses 75% of existing ag land and do more vertical farming. I am a big fan of vertical farming to feed the world but I love my steak and chicken. Vert farming requires less land, less water, less chemicals, locally grown which reduces carbon footprint to distribute and allows for product to ripen more before harvest since it spends less time in transport. And climate is not a consideration.

Vertical Farming Saves Water and Land and Could Help Global Food Security, Expert Says - EcoWatch

The future of food is growing up. With the climate crisis and disruptions in the supply chain, “controlled-environment agriculture,” which has been around since the 1970s and includes vertical farming, is gaining more attention as a way to grow healthy food using artificial light, reported The New York Times. The price of LED lights dropped by as much as 94 percent from 2008 to 2015, which helped growing operations move indoors.

“It’s the ability to put production anywhere without considering climate,” said the CEO of agricultural start-up Plenty Unlimited Arama Kukutai, as The New York Times reported. One of the biggest upsides to vertical farming is the space and soil it saves.

“Crops are grown in spaces ranging in size from small boxes that can be placed in homes or offices to industrial production facilities with several thousand square meters of growing area,” said Professor of Digital Agriculture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Senthold Asseng, in an interview with TUM. “Vertical farming has the potential to grow up to 100 layers of crops above one another on one hectare of land. This will conserve large areas of agricultural land.”

Some benefits to vertical farming include using far less water, protection from traditional pests because of the indoor environment and crops being able to be harvested numerous times per year. “Vertical farming allows multiple harvests of a cropper year and can make a substantial contribution to global food security. If we optimize the growing conditions for a crop in a closed system, cut off from the outside world, we can reduce water requirements by up to 90 percent and eliminate the need for chemical crop protection,” Asseng told TUM.

 

open field farming still uses more land, more water, and requires chemicals that controlled space environments do not. It also requires more transport to market than if the crop is grown in the middle of the city in an industrial district somewhere

It would also seem that anything grown under panels would require 100% manual labor as tractors and aerial spraying would not work

 

cost and time to build the nexgen nuclear plants will be substantially less with the plug and play models being developed and they can be strategically located to take advantage of the existing power grid.

 

bird deaths are what limits the efficiency of the windmills, smaller, faster blades would produce more energy. Invent a way to keep birds away from windmills and make a fortune

Love eagles too but they are becoming quite common, especially in Florida. Ian wiped out lots of nests and now eagles are finding new trees which is driving the development business crazy. I have told clients that if they have a tall, sturdy pine tree without a nest on their site to go cut it down and worry about it later. AN eagle moving into a previously permitted project can cause major headaches.

We salmon fish (harvest) in Alaska most summers and the flat where everybody dnags sockeyes is always populated with 10 - 30 eagles out there taking carcasses or feasting on seagulls that are also after the carcasses. I watched a guy handfeed a filleted salmon carcass to an eagle last summer.

One challenge is that eagles are scavengers and when windmill kills small birds, eagles come in to feed on the dead birds and get hit themselves.

ESI just needed to apply for incidental take permits and implement a few other measures to avoid the fines and didn't want to spend the pennies to get the permits. Stupid cost cutting move.

A wind energy company has pleaded guilty after killing at least 150 eagles : NPR

Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution if they take steps to avoid bird deaths and seek permits for those that occur. ESI did not seek such a permit, authorities said.

The company was warned prior to building the wind farms in New Mexico and Wyoming that they would kill birds, but it proceeded anyway and at times ignored advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.

"For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit," said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.

 

Concept at work in Africa

Combining crops and solar panels is allowing Kenya to ‘harvest the sun twice’