"Biden’s Plan to Carpet America With Energy Diffuse Wind & Solar"

Source:

https://stopthesethings.com/2021/04/27/land-hunger-games-bidens-plan-to-carpet-america-with-energy-diffuse-wind-solar/

"It’s not just wind and solar power’s pathetic performance that makes the whole virtue signaling exercise so utterly pointless.

It’s also the fact that, to generate anything other than a trivial amount of electricity, you need the best part of a continent’s land area to do it.

To accommodate 2,000 MW of coal, gas or nuclear power generation plant requires the same area taken up by a couple of 18-hole golf courses.

... accommodating 2,000 MW of wind power requires an area the size of Belgium.

... and then you still need 2,000 MW of coal, gas or nuclear power to accommodate those hundreds of occasions each year when wind and solar power is producing absolutely nothing.

Sound pointless to you?

Then it probably is. Here’s Robert Bradley picking up the thread.

Land-Intensive Renewables: Three TW of Wind and Solar = 228,000 sq. miles
Master Resource
1 April 2021

... “Though [the Princeton] study concludes that ‘adequate land area exists’ to deploy enough wind and solar power … getting there will require building wind and solar units and power lines right now matching the highest annuals levels ever achieved in the United States.

And development would only accelerate from there.” (E&E News.)

... an E&E article ... by Peter Behr and Jeffrey Tomich, “Biden’s Dilemma: Land for Renewables” (March 24, 2021).

“Picture an area of land equal to the combined territories of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island — 228,000 square miles in all,” the article began.

“That’s the space that could be required to site most of the massive deployments of wind and solar generation required to fulfill President Biden’s goal of a net-zero-carbon economy by midcentury, according to a recent first-ever project to attempt mapping that future.”

This estimate was produced in “Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts,” a 345-page study released late last year authored by 10 Princeton researchers and 8 external collaborators.


        Wind projects drive total farm area, which is concentrated in the Great Plains and Midwest and primarily on crop, pasture, and forested lands.

        Wind farms have large spatial extent and significant visual impact, but directly impact only 1% of total site area and can co-exist with farming and grazing.

        Conversely, directly impacted land area is dominated by solar and greatest in the Northeast and Southeast; forested lands make up the largest directly impacted land cover type.

        Solar farms are more compact but also more intensive, directly impacting ~90% of their area.

... For generations, the placement of energy infrastructure has pitted utilities and developers against protesting residents who want no part of it….

“People completely underestimate the scale of the challenge,” said Jürgen Weiss, co-author of a study by the Brattle Group on meeting New England’s clean energy goals.

… the [Princeton] analysis offers an answer … by ruling out types of land parcels that don’t make sense geographically or politically, such as steep slopes, floodplains, protected wilderness areas and sites with concentrated populations ...

Also remember the late Peter Huber, who memorably wrote (Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists [1999], pp. 105, 108):

The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. …

[In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption….

The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green." "