Green against Green: Energy Sprawl

Sometimes environmentalists fight renewable energy. Green arguments against green energy come into play wherever wind-farms spoil mountaintops or shore views and the problems are not simply aesthetics but extend to deforestation, coverage of highly productive agricultural soils or disturbance of wildlife. Cleverly, wind and solar industries have adopted the term farm to distract from the fact that their renewable energy production is often industrial and its only connection to farms is that farmland gets covered up for energy production.

 Amazon Solar Farm Accomack, Virginia

Local jurisdictions usually control land use, and often they are at a loss how to classify those wind and solar "farms" since the ag zoning category clearly offers little help. If big enough, power generation sometimes becomes a matter of the state and its utility controlling Public Service Commission.

The Baltimore County Council just deferred an application for a solar "farm" until it had a chance to study the issue how planting solar panels on the ground fits into their current zoning code. The matter isn't just a local problem but has global implications.

Land is an increasingly scarce global resource that is subject to competing pressures from agriculture, human settlement, and energy development. As countries concerned about climate change seek to decarbonize their power sectors, renewable energy sources like wind and solar offer obvious advantages. However, the land needed for new energy infrastructure is also an important environmental consideration. The land requirement of different electricity sources varies considerably, but there are very few studies that offer a normalized comparison. (source)

This is by no means a trivial matter either. A paper released last month by a Yale Fellow concludes that energy sprawl, the demand on land from all energy (not just renewables) will outpace land consumption from resdiential development.

over 800,000 km2 of additional land area will be affected by energy development, an area greater than the size of Texas. This pace of development in the United States is more than double the historic rate of urban and residential development, which has been the greatest driver of conversion in the United States since 1970, and is higher than projections for future land use change from residential development or agriculture. (Energy Sprawl, abstract)

A lot of land consumption comes from fossil fuels. As a non- renewable energy it is in the nature of fossil fuel to leave the depleted land behind while looking for new areas to mine, drill or remove mountain-tops. That adds up: The Duke Nicholas School of the Environment writes in a paper about Energy Sprawl:

 Coal mining, including mountain-top removal mining, has denuded 2200 square miles (5700 km2) of land, much of it in the Appalachian mountains in the past decade.  Between 2000 and 2012, the pads, tanks, roads, and pipelines that support the oil and gas industry were estimated to grow by 10,500 square miles (30000 km2), mostly in croplands and rangelands across America.

Green energy doesn't leave destroyed lands behind but occupies land permanently with a more or less sustaining supply of energy. However, with the drive away from fossil fuels towards renewables, their share in energy production rises and with it an increasing hunger for space, exacerbated by the fact that the energy density of renewables is lower than fossil, i.e. renewables tend to take much more space than fossil fuels per energy unit. However, thanks to their much larger share in teh energy pie, oil gas and coal use  by far more land than renewables in absolute terms. The Duke paper concludes that green energy needs about 100 times the land area that nuclear or fossil needs:

Land-use intensity—the amount of land needed to produce a TerraWatt-hour (TWhr) of electricity each year—ranges from 1.9 to 2.8 km2 per TWhr per year for nuclear to 2.5 to 17 km2/TW-hr for coal and 433 to 654 km2/TW-hr/yr for energy crops that are burned in power plants. Thus, to replace the current electric power sources of the U.S. with bioenergy would impact an area at least 100X greater than that affected by coal and nuclear sources.

The matter of green energy sprawl has become so urgent that Maryland's environmentalists have put it on their agenda and it landed on the desk of the 1000 Friends of Maryland, a group dedicated to effective land use, smart growth and community revitalization which I helped nurse to life 22 years ago. The question: When does green become the enemy of green?

Solar farm on a rooftop

The conflict is much more common than one may assume: Whether huge fields are being dedicated  to growing crops for biofuel instead of food production or the crop consists in fields of solar cells "planted" on ag land, whether land flooded for hydroelectric reservoirs feeding water turbines, or windmills sprout on fields or hilltops, it all consumes land. It is almost always not only the space needed for the primary production of renewable energy that fuels land consumption but also the secondary uses for power distribution-lines and substations.

Between 2007 and 2011, the United States increased its energy production by 15% [1]. Over 82,000 km2 were directly impacted by new energy infrastructure, an area nearly the size of Maine The landscape impacts were nearly double, at 161,000 km2 , due to the spacing requirements of wells and wind turbines. Considering the direct footprint, biofuels accounted for two thirds of the energy sprawl (67%; 55,390 km2 ), despite comprising only 6% of total energy production.

What can be done to overcome the green-green conflict? Depending on which policies one subscribes to, different answers will be offered. If reduced land consumption were the only objective, nuclear energy would be the best option. If only renewable energy and carbon footprint would matter, solar may come out on top. Depending on which objectives get weighed against each other, the following options are possible:

• reducing energy demand through efficiency 
• Increased usage of nuclear power (a very good ration of footprint and energy output)
• increased usage of solar power on structures and restricted on natural lands
• micro grids that use less land for distribution
• new technologies that make renewable energy more intensive reducing the footprint or integrate them directly into structures such as building facades
• designation of suitable renewable energy production districts

These strategies are all like steering the Titanic, none will show significant immediate change. To help in making the land use decisions on the local level that are needed tomorrow and next week, it is necessary to classify large-scale energy production, even if it is renewable, in terms of zoning and land use.

Large solar farm in Arizona

Until recently, jurisdictions were badgered to allow solar where zoning rules were too strict. With a focus on small installations on rooftops, the emphasis was on relaxing zoning to permit solar where the code demanded too many things such as setbacks. The fragmented nature of local land use jurisprudence is clearly a thorn in the eye of energy industries, whether their products are renewable or not:

Although both the federal and state levels of government have a strong interest in encouraging the deployment of renewable energy systems, the power to permit solar energy systems under land use law has been delegated by most states to local villages, towns, and cities (Zoning for Solar Energy)

However, with the onset of solar production on an industrial scale, the issue is no longer a solar panel on a residential roof but the installation of large solar "fields" or "farms". The same holds true for wind: Once a matter of a farmer here and there installing small wind mills, the matter has expanded to full blown mountain-top or off-shore windfarms with sometimes hundreds of windmills with heights as big as downtown bank headquarters.

Historic farm wind mill for pumps

Environmental impacts are plentiful, from the production site itself to access roadways (for construction and for operation) distribution lines and substations. Solar and wind-farms can have impacts not only on land and vegetation, wildlife or hydraulics of an area, they can also adversely affect wildlife.

Windfarms, picturesque or blight?

Types of solar systems include:

Roof- or building-mounted solar energy systems: attached to the top of a building or structure. Generally, a roof-mounted system is secured using racking level with the roof or tilted toward the sun.
Ground-mounted or freestanding solar energy systems: installed directly in the ground and not attached to any existing structure. Single or multiple panels can be mounted on individual or multiple poles.
Example:

The Long Island Solar Farm (LISF) is a 32-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant built through a collaboration including BP Solar, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), and the Department of Energy. The LISF, located on the Brookhaven National Laboratory site, began delivering power to the LIPA grid in November 2011, and is currently the largest solar photovoltaic power plant in the Eastern United States. It is generating enough renewable energy to power approximately 4,500 homes, and is helping New York State meet its clean energy and carbon reduction goals. (source)

Building-integrated solar energy systems: Incorporated into a building or structure rather than existing as separate equipment. Building-integrated systems are used as a envelope component of the building, such as a roofing system or building façade. This can include roof shingles or tiles, laminates, glass, semi-transparent skylights, awnings, and fixed awnings. As a rule, zoning usually does not include definitions for such building components but municipalities may include zoning definitions for building-integrated solar energy systems to clarify differences in approval process requirements for the different system types.

Regulating wind turbines is even more complicated than solar due to the height of the structures, the noise and buffereing associated with them and the much greater potential for visual impacts.

 Quantifying the area of a wind power plant is challenging given the discontinuous nature of its configuration. “Area” includes not only land directly disturbed by installation of the turbines, but also the surrounding area that potentially may be impacted. In reviewing various environmental impact assessments and other evaluations of wind plant land use, it appears that there are two general types of “areas” considered. The first is the direct surface area impact (i.e., disturbed land) due to plant construction and infrastructure. The second is more vaguely defined, but is associated with the total area of the wind power plant as a whole (Land Use Requirements of modern wind plants)

A Useful Community Development website written by planners for planners says:

"we suggest that any wind energy generating device require a conditional use permit under the wind turbine zoning provisions. A conditional use permit usually requires public hearings before the planning commission and city council, and action by the latter. "Conditions" for construction and/or performance also may be imposed by the governing body.

industrial production of biofuel

Wind farms also are an issue  for public lands such a National Forest or STate and National Parks. A zoning ordinance especially written for wind-turbines needs to address height, setbacks, noise, access and structures at the base of a turbine.  The reactive mode in which energy companies enter the discussion after having already picked where they want to place things in a for them optimal way isn't sufficient to plan land use in a rational way.

For wind-or solar-farms the approach needs to be more comprehensive and more pro-active, such as the inclusion in a comprehensive plan. In collaboration with energy providers jurisdictions need to develop a strategy regarding where such installations are not only useful but also acceptable. Designated renewable energy production areas within a jurisdiction would be the result of a system approach in all elements in a complex system such as water, wildlife, agriculture, industry, energy and other aspects such as economic development are weighed and optimized.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA   updated 10/27/16

Cool Green Science 09/2016: Energy Sprawl
New York Times 08/2009, Energy Sprawl
Curbing energy sprawl with micro-grids
The Future of Solar (MIT)
Land Use Intensity of Electricity Production
Guide to Zoning for Renewable Energy
Zoning for Solar Energy:Resource Guide 
Planning and Zoning for Solar Energy  and here (APA)

Wind energy model ordinance options (New York State)

Resources:
U.S. Energy Information Association. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html3 American Wind Energy Association. http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_basics.html
U.S. Energy Information Association. http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/aeo06/assumption/renewable.html
American Wind Energy Association: http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_environment.html .
Sunpower® Tracker Solar Systems: http://www.progress-energy.com/aboutus/news/article.asp?id=18882