How Much Land Would it Require to Get Most of Our Electricity directly occupied by wind and solar infrastructure by 2035
. EIA also projects US battery storage capacity to more than double in 2023.
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.
NREL LAND-USE MODELING Total area occupied by wind turbines and solar photovoltaic infrastructure is roughly equal to the land occupied by railroads. Perhaps most important, though, is the fact that replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar will dramatically reduce the amount of land needed for mining, drilling, transporting, producing and using fossil fuels.
That said, mining some critical minerals for wind turbines, solar panels and batteries can have significant land-use impacts. Stringent policies and safeguards are needed to avoid, minimize and mitigate these impacts. Most of this mining currently occurs in other countries, but the IRA and the infrastructure law both include incentives to source more of these minerals domestically.
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