I put together a spread sheet and made some rough calculations on how much land would be used if we were to gain our electricity solely through wind turbines. As you can see I ran one calculation estimating the land usage necessary to only power the residential properties (on 2001 electricity data), and a separate calculation estimating total land usage to supply ALL electric consumption in the United States.
These numbers assume 40 acres are needed for one turbine. Estimates range up to about 50 acres per turbine, so my numbers may actually be conservative. Most people do not realize how spread out wind turbines are. There are roads and infrastructure that must go in to building a wind farm. As well, the base of each turbine is planted in a very large concrete pad. Transmission lines are also necessary for moving the electricity to a main power grid.
I have also used a 1.5 mega Watt turbine as these seem to be the most commonly used turbine. Obviously, if 3 mW turbines were the only ones used we could bring efficiency up and negate half of the number of units and also halve the land being consumed.
So, just to power all residential homes in the United States, we would necessitate lands roughly equal in size to Lousiana. To gain all US electricity through wind, we would use up about as much land as Montana holds.
Here is another critical piece of information that most people don’t understand. When you transport electricity from a wind farm you lose quite a bit of it as it travels further down a transportation line. So there is a certain degree to which the electricity generated will be depleted before it ever reaches its destination. In some cases, this depletion can be as high as 50%. Because of this our necessary land sizes for power generation may reasonably be doubled. In such a case powering the entire United States from Wind Power alone could feasible consume enough land to fit inside of the entire state of Texas.
Some methods of electricity generation can be extremely costly in terms of land amounts used.
September 1st, 2009 at
The turbines have to be spaced far apart. I don’t think anything requires that the land in between is unused. Similar to how ranches and farms work around oil/gas wellheads, they can do the same with wind turbines.
I’m also curious to see whether low production but low-impact (little noise especially) turbines start doing well in the home market as supplemental power in windy areas. There are also horizontal turbines that can be mounted along the parapet walls of flat roofed structures.
September 1st, 2009 at
Spacing is about 1 turbine per 40 acres. You can use the land between them, sure. Remember though that the energy created is directly related to size, and these can be extremely large. So the low impact units are a decent residential idea.. If you can stomach a price tag in the $20 to $30,000.00 range.
September 1st, 2009 at
[...] Wind Power and Land Consumption [...]