Wind and solar infrastructure would take up less than 1% of land

Comparatively small footprint NREL found that the land area directly occupied by wind and solar infrastructure by 2035 would make up less than 1 percent of the land in 94 percent of the country and less than or equal to 7 percent of total land area in just three states. A key reason why a relatively small amount of land is needed is because only 2 percent of the total area within a wind farm is occupied by wind infrastructure, while the remaining 98 percent is available for agriculture, grazing, or other uses. Offshore wind turbines also have a relatively small footprint and are able to use much larger turbines than land-based projects. Rooftop solar deployment, meanwhile, doesn’t require any land. Of course, to deliver all this clean energy from wind-rich regions in the Midwest and Plains states to major load centers in the East will also require a lot of additional transmission lines. NREL found that total US transmission capacity would have to increase by 1.3 to 2.9 times current levels by 2035. This would require 1,400 to 10,100 miles of new high-capacity lines per year, assuming new construction began in 2026. But the big news is NREL found that the total amount of land needed by 2035 to achieve our clean power goals with wind, solar, and long-distance transmission lines (19,700 sq. mi) would be: equivalent to the land area currently occupied by railroads (18,500 sq. mi) less than half the area of active oil and gas leases (40,500 sq. mi) less than one-third of the area currently needed for ethanol production (59,500 sq. mi), and only slightly more than the historically disturbed land area for coal mining (13,100 sq. mi). Plus, NREL’s main “All Options” scenario projects roughly 250,000 wind turbines in the United States, which is considerably less than the nation’s 1.5 million oil and gas wells.