All the Land, Everywhere

With it being Renewable Energy Day, it’s well timed to bring this thought to the surface, the US is significantly more ‘land constrained’ than our three best national studies from Princeton, NREL, and TNC have shown to date. Land constrained, meaning there is less “suitable land” available for renewable energy (RE) and transmission buildout than is currently projected… which would mean that the distribution of future projects across the US and, therefore, the resulting system costs should change materially. That change should have dynamic changes for community long-term expectations and their comprehensive planning.  

The National studies have continued to evolve to consider timely energy industry politics, subsidies, and technology. Nevertheless, there remain stark differences in how “constraint data” is used to develop “project areas”. Both land use and energy infrastructure are complex topics, reasonable assumptions must be made, guided by industry experts. There are at least three macro-level considerations not made for utility-scale development which would improve how “realistic” these study results would appear, which include:

1. Exclude counties with moratoriums and handicap ones with restrictive Ordinances – over 15% of the country has a restrictive ordinances or moratoriums. I personally would not be surprised if this increased to 25% in the next 5 years as pressure to adopt renewables continue to grow through the end of this decade. What does that scenario look like? Let’s model it.

2. Exclude small parcels – consider buffering from parcels under 10 acres, using at least 300’ for solar and 1,000’ for wind. Princeton used a population density modifier, but I think the impact is still understated. Theory is it is inefficient to sign many leases with smaller landowners for developers, and there is a very high likelihood these parcels have residences that have viewshed concerns or limit siteability.

3. Include a Landowner Acceptance Assumption – Simple Boolean assumption for individual landowner cooperation, to represent landowner sentiment and their right to say “yes or no” to participation in a project. Theory being, that normally at least 1 in 5 residence in most cases no matter how much effort a company applies would say, “no”. This of course would be statistically challenging to prove this other than through widespread surveys, but you can look at any built project and see there are non-participating landowners within the array, wind and solar.

I am going to go one step further and talk about market making. I am of the position that the DOE will need to sponsor something I would call the Homeland Energy Lease Program (HELP) that creates what I want to call Renewable Energy Lease Area Zones, Onshore (RELAZO). Because everyone loves good acronyms! This program would, functionally, be a lot like BOEM’s Offshore Wind Energy Areas (WEA) leases in Federal Waters and BLM for solar on Federal Lands but instead be a massive onshore undertaking to ‘pre-qualify Private Lands and Communities’ for renewable energy development in the 2028-2035-time frame, ‘when the going gets [really] tough’ for RE deployment.

Ideally, my proposed program would seek to reduce the upfront cost the private sector has to bear to greenfield (or prospect) new sites but ultimately more efficiently utilize our nation’s land. I would compare the current private development approach to urban sprawl vs this program creating a ‘planned community’ or proper ‘urban planning’. The DOE would, therefore, take on the burden of doing initial site suitability and public engagement to earn the community’s approval to then bid the developments, in an auction style format, to the private sector (including utilities, Munis, Co-ops, IPPs, etc.) to finish development, construct, and operate.

This started as a thought exercise, but it should be a call to action. This program would need to be established in 2025 to be effective. If you see the projections from these studies for hitting 2050 targets, the industry needs to double its throughput. If it wants to hit 2035 targets – good night – it needs to do more in a year than it’s used to doing in a decade. Not to mention that it calls for 2-3x the transmission capacity and – guess  what – 2-3x higher power prices, which will likely surpass $100/MWh wholesale on average in regions for firm RE power. That’s where this federal program needs to supplement efforts to increase site availability and reduce ‘exploration costs’ and ‘inefficient private competition’ for the same land which can cause multi-year delays and ballooning RE power prices. Furthermore, this program would be addressing an extremely timely phenomenon: the shift for interconnection queue processes to require full site control in almost every market to commence study. This program would re-allow private developers to pass through both these studies in parallel again instead of in series, relieving a serious headwind.

I keep asking myself, “Is this wind and solar buildout going to be something I am proud of in ten years?” I ask this because if you review these maps, and the steel already in the ground on Lawrence Berkley National Lab’s US Wind Turbine Database and SEIA’s Project Location Map, how can you not think to yourself, “Wow, that is a lot of acreage!” Even if it is a “win” that RE will use less land than the coal mining and oil & gas industries did in their hay da, we need to be more planned, more disciplined, more long-term focused with land use development.