A large solar thermal power plant in Spain. Renewable energy projects based on biomass, wind, and solar need a lot of land to generate and transmit electricity. Photo: afloresm, flickr
An article in the Washington Post, "Renewable Energy's Environmental Paradox," addresses the inherent conflict between land conservation and renewable energy. All the alternatives to fossil fuels -- biomass, wind, and solar -- require a lot of land to produce the electricity needed to keep civilization humming.
The article includes a chart showing the square miles of land needed by biomass, wind, and solar to produce a terawatt-hour of electricity for a year. So as our own civilization keeps sprawling across the landscape, so do our energy needs. "Energy sprawl" becomes a term that will likely come into greater use as land-intensive alternative energy schemes are proposed and built.
..."One of the biggest challenges renewable-energy projects pose is that they often take up much more land than conventional sources, such as coal-fired power plants. A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.
"The impact will be "substantial," said Jimmie Powell, the Nature Conservancy's national energy leader and one of the paper's co-authors. "It's important to know where the footprint is going to be..."
Washington Post: Renewable Energy's Environmental Paradox
Washington Post (graphic): Environmental Tradeoffs
Nature Conservancy: Energy Sprawl and U.S. Climate Policy
Nature Conservancy: Cool Green Science Blog: Two Thoughts on New Energy
Public Library of Science: Link TK
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