Avoiding Energy Sprawl

While wind and solar power are certainly good ideas and valuable energy supplements, there is one very large drawback that is often ignored by renewable advocates: Energy Sprawl. This is the term used to describe the incredibly vast land areas required to implement wind or solar power on any significant scale needed to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Nuclear power has by far the highest energy density both in matters of fuel consumption and land use. A 1000 MW single unit nuclear power plant takes just one square mile (including a large buffer zone around the perimeter of the plant). That is roughly 0.65 acres to make 1 kW of power. Some nuclear plants have 2, 3, or even 4 reactors on a single site making for an even more efficient use of land area.

How does the land requirements of wind or solar measure up to nuclear?

Area Needed for Wind Turbines

Estimates for the land area required for wind vary immensely from 10 to 60 acres per megawatt. The height, efficiency and location of the turbine is the source of such a wide range. To put this in perspective, while a 1000 MW nuclear power plant occupies one square mile, a 1000 MW wind plant would require up to 94 square miles of land. It would require an area the size of the state of West Virginia to build enough wind turbine to provide for all of the electricity demand of the United States. Of course that number ignores the capacity factor of wind so you would need considerably more turbines spread throughout the country to compensate for when the wind isn’t blowing.

Another land requirement is transmission. A large array of wind turbines would also require a transmission line to each and every turbine with miles upon miles of interconnection. These transmission lines and towers require additional clearing of land. A nuclear plant is a more centralized generator requiring just one connection.

But the outlook for wind isn’t all gloom and doom. There are plenty of ways to implement wind on a more reasonable scale that do not contribute excessively to energy sprawl. There are options like offshore wind turbines and building turbines on small parcels in the middle of farmland that make smaller amounts of power while occupying otherwise unused pieces of land. There is also the possibility of placing turbines on the rooftops of houses and high rises. This would also allow for the generation of power in an otherwise unused place. However, each of these more reasonable concepts doesn’t produce energy on a significant or cost effective scale and at best can serve to supplement the power supply generated by base load sources.

Area Needed for Solar Panels

Solar also occupies large areas of land. On average, solar power generates 1 MW of power from 8 acres of solar panels on a sunny day, with Solar Photovoltaic taking more area and Solar Thermal slightly less. To replace a 1 sqaure mile nuclear plant, solar would require 12.5 square miles. Consider what the carbon footprint might be of cutting down 12.5 square miles of trees to replace that nuclear plant with solar. Now consider that you will need 5X that area to compensate for the poor performance of solar when the sun goes down and on a cloudy day. Also, as with wind, solar panels require extensive transmission connection in order to reach the grid as opposed to the single connection with nuclear.

There are however ways to use solar that avoid clearing large pieces of land. One would suspect using land in the desert would be optimal, but of course the same groups that tout solar and bash nuclear are the same ones that prevented a 440 MW solar plant from being built in the Mojave Desert because of tortoise migration patterns. The realistic application for solar panels is on rooftops. Of course this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Currently rooftop solar takes 30 years to pay for itself when installed on a house. The price would have to come down to 1/3 of that for the average Joe to consider the investment. Also, and this might sound far fetched, but consider how many people will fall off the roof and die from trying to clean or fix rooftop solar panels. Again, that sounds silly, but consider that over 100 nuclear plants operating in the USA for 40 years have not killed a single member of the public. So rooftop solar, when compared against the so-called “dangerous” nuclear power, will kill more people than Chernobyl every year.

Supplemental Renewables with Base Load Nuclear

Nuclear power is by far the more efficient use of land when compared to wind and solar power. While both renewable sources clearly have a roll to play in a clean energy economy, it’s obvious that a reliance on only these two sources is irresponsible even without considering capacity factor. The real solution is a diverse approach to electricity generation. The most important piece is to replace dirty base load coal by expanding base load nuclear generation to 80% of our electrical needs. The next is to modernize and preserve our hydroelectric capacity. Finally, we need to replace the expensive, carbon emitting natural gas with wind and solar supplements. When combined with energy storage these sources could be competitive with natural gas during periods of peak demand while sidestepping around the problem of being intermittent. This will allow us to utilize those clean sources without devastating vast amounts of land.

Wind and solar should be developed and invested in. However the key to doing so successfully is a disciplined approach that tempers the numerically blind idealism of many environmental groups. Only then can we even think about how to replace oil.

Image Credit

Windmill Energy Sprawl courtesy of Wikimedia Commons published under the CC license.