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Yesterday, Jim Efstathiou Jr. reported from Bloomberg that the Cap-and-Trade Bill, in its current form, would boost the amount of land required for the development of energy by approximately 48%. This is because the Bill places a lot of importance on renewable energy technologies like biomass and wind power. Critics are calling this “energy sprawl.” Although, unlike it’s evil twin “urban sprawl,” the Sierra Club doesn’t have a website devoted to grinding it to a halt. The Sierra Club claims to support preservation and conservation of the environment while also avidly supporting the use of wind and solar power. While not being a contradiction in theory, (renewables are environmentally friendly from an emission and fuel resource standpoint) this stance is a blaring contradiction in reality because of the massive amounts of land required to support most renewable technologies. Maybe the Sierra Club would benefit from checking out how much land their ardent support for wind and solar requires in order to produce as much energy as say, nuclear power.
Here are two blogs where I previously addressed this issue:
What Does Renewable Energy Look Like
What Does Renewable Energy Look Like Part II
Forests, Deserts in Climate Measure May Spawn “Energy Sprawl”
By Jim Efstathiou Jr.
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) — More forests, deserts and grasslands in the U.S. will be used to produce energy under a proposal to cap greenhouse gases, an unintended consequence of efforts to fight global warming, according to a Nature Conservancy report.
A bill that boosts energy from wind turbines and biofuels will increase the amount of land needed for energy development as much as 48 percent, or almost 100,000 square kilometers (38,600 square miles) during the next 20 years, said Robert McDonald, a scientist with the Arlington, Virginia-based Nature Conservancy environmental group. An area larger than Minnesota will be affected even without any climate change bill, he said.
Less land will be needed to grow corn for cleaner-burning ethanol and to support electric-generating wind turbines if legislation gives carbon-dioxide emitters more options to reach targets, said the report, published today in the online journal PloS One. Greater energy conservation can also reduce the amount of land needed for development.
“Climate-change legislation could have a significant impact on land use in the U.S. but it might not if it’s properly designed,” McDonald, lead author of the report, said in an interview. “We’re tying to make sure that energy sprawl is one of the things policy makers are thinking about.”
Biofuel made from corn, along with biomass burned to make electricity, affects the most land for every unit of energy produced. Nuclear power uses the least amount of land, the report said.
Corn for Ethanol
Growing corn for ethanol on land already used for agriculture is one way to reduce the area needed to meet future energy needs, McDonald said. Allowing utilities and manufacturers with carbon-dioxide caps to use offsets — credits from projects that lower emissions — to meet pollution targets also reduces land use for energy.
The report analyzes the land-use implications of a climate- change bill that failed in the U.S. Senate last year. A bill that passed the U.S. House in June would have a “very similar” effect, McDonald said.
“Depending on the details of the bill, there may be millions of acres of new development,” McDonald said. “While we’re changing the rules of the system, we want to think about the land-use impacts.”
Without climate-change legislation, new coal-fired power plants will be built on over 26,000 square kilometers of conifer and deciduous forests, grasslands and desert, according to the report. Under a climate bill, costs for power from burning fossil fuels will rise, and the area needed for coal-burning power plants will be reduced by 7,500 square kilometers.
More land, meanwhile, will be needed for lower-emissions energy from biomass, biofuels and wind turbines. More than 49,000 square kilometers will be needed just to grown biomass that can be burned for electricity under a climate-change bill.
“In the scenarios we considered, there is a tendency for greater reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to be associated with a greater total new area affected by energy development,” the report said. “A decrease in U.S. emissions increases the new area impacted, although the magnitude of the effect is policy-specific.”
