A6. Land Use

Currently, the US uses 81 million acres of land to power the entirety of the energy sector (which includes power generation, transportation, and heating, among other things) [i]. A majority of that land goes to growing crops (e.g. soy and corn) used for liquid biofuels, with substantial swaths of land also use by hydropower, solar and wind farms, gas pipeline easements, power line easements, and oil and gas production, as shown in the maps below. In total, the US energy sector uses the area of roughly Iowa and Missouri (combined).

Figure 28: Current US Energy Sector Land Use [ii]

Figure 28: Current US Energy Sector Land Use [ii]

The wind energy land use has an important caveat to it: of the 6.7 million acres used for wind farms, only 0.07 million acres represents the land on-the-ground that’s truly unavailable for other uses – in other words, although the wind farms are spread out across 6.7 million acres of land, the majority of that land is still economically useful for purposes such as agriculture or raising livestock.

Princeton University’s Net-Zero America project estimates the land use required for a fully decarbonized US economy by 2050. One scenario in particular depends exclusively on renewables (i.e. it includes the elimination of all fossil-fuel and nuclear use) and includes the electrification of transport and buildings [iii]. Such constraints would require an additional 250 million acres of wind farms, 17 million acres of solar farms, and 15 million acres of offshore wind farms (though the actual footprint of wind turbines is far smaller):

fig. 29.jpg

Figure 29: US Energy Sector Land Use in a 100% Renewable Energy System [iv]

The map above overlays the additional land use over the existing land use in the US (note that actual land use is and will be distributed across the country). Since the US has very little offshore wind capacity, virtually all of it is new under this scenario [1]. This particular energy system uses land to cover Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma (in addition to Iowa and Missouri). However, there’s still plenty of room for these additions: the map below shows that the optimal locations for wind are largely croplands and pastures. Indeed, wind developers already pay many ranchers and land owners fees to place turbines on private property – payments in 2020 totaled $820 million [v].

Figure 30: Distribution of Land Types in the US [vi]

Figure 30: Distribution of Land Types in the US [vi]

Princeton’s modeling also looked into other US net-zero scenarios, another of which enabled nuclear power and fossil-fuel electricity generation with carbon capture. In this scenario, new wind (offshore and onshore) and solar development are still large, though not quite as ambitious as in the other scenario:

Figure 31: Land Use for an Alternative Net-Zero US Energy System [vii]

Figure 31: Land Use for an Alternative Net-Zero US Energy System [vii]

This scenario requires 200 million fewer acres of land. Wind and solar provide 44% of electricity in this scenario, while nuclear and natural-gas (with carbon capture) plants produce 50% of power (which would in turn require several new power generation plants).

Ultimately, however, actual land use requirements are likely to be somewhat higher than optimally-placed modeling would suggest. Local residents may resist wind farms or nuclear plants placed nearby, which in turn may force power plants to move to less-optimal locations without such opposition. As noted in Section 2.3, Texas’ CREZ project resulted in 50% more miles of transmission built, partially due to a need to avoid private property when landowners wanted power lines to avoid their land. Ultimately, however, land requirements are unlikely to be a major roadblock to a fully decarbonized power sector.

[1] Bloomberg reports that the US had 7 offshore wind turbines as of 2020. Princeton’s 100% renewables scenario, however, requires 40,000 by 2050. According to the Global Wind Energy Council, the US has 42 MW of offshore wind turbines installed, compared to 122,426 MW of onshore wind (https://gwec.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/GWEC-Global-Wind-Report-2021.pdf, page 31).