A clean energy transition that avoids environmentally sensitive land

In this episode, Jessica Wilkinson and Nels Johnson of The Nature
Conservancy discuss the pathway they see for a rapid, low-cost
clean energy transition that minimizes impact on environmentally
sensitive land.


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transcript)


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Text transcript:


David Roberts


A great deal of confused and misleading information is
circulating about the land-use requirements of the energy
transition. Everyone agrees that building the amount of clean
energy necessary to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will
require an enormous amount of land.


But is there enough land? Will the transition require
industrializing green fields and virgin forests and other
environmentally or culturally sensitive lands? Can the energy
transition be done big enough and fast enough while still
remaining respectful of natural resources and other species? What
mix of technologies will go most lightly on the environment?


To provide a definitive answer to these questions, The Nature
Conservancy launched its Power of Place project — first in
California, then for the greater American West, and now, this
week, for the entire nation.


Using various metrics related to wildlife, ecosystems, cultural
resources, and protected natural areas, the Power of Place
project attempts to comprehensively map out sensitive land areas.
It then tallies up the amount of clean energy required to reach
net zero by 2050 and tries to match those needs to the available
lands, to see if there is a pathway to net zero that protects
them.


The good news is that, with some wise planning, the amount of
environmentally sensitive land impacted by a business-as-usual
clean-energy transition can be substantially reduced at
relatively low cost.


To discuss this and other findings of the report, I contacted
Jessica Wilkinson (Power of Place project manager) and Nels
Johnson (the project’s science and technology lead) of The Nature
Conservancy. We discussed the technology shifts that will enable
a lighter footprint, the policies that could help encourage them,
and the best ways to avoid community resistance.


Alright, then. Jessica Wilkinson and Nells Johnson. Welcome to
Volts. Thank you so much for coming.


Jessica Wilkinson


Thank you for having us.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, thanks for having us, David.


David Roberts


Jessica, let's start with you. The subject of land-use and
renewable energy, there's a lot of weird information and
misinformation floating around about this, a lot of weird myths,
a lot of sort of people with strong opinions who don't know what
they're talking about. So what inspired this series of reports,
the Power of Place reports? What inspired you to start
undertaking this project?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah, this is precisely one of the reasons that we were inspired
to do this project under sighting, as usual. Like the way that
we're proceeding now with a renewable energy build-out, we are
seeing an increase in local opposition, and we are seeing
concerns about land-use issues. And land-use and environmental
issues are indeed kind of one of the obstacles that's popping up
in the way of us being able to meet our clean energy goals and
meet our clean energy goals rapidly. So we really started this
work in California, which was the first time we kind of developed
this Power of Place methodology and that refurbished report came
out in 2019.


We refined it and then released Power of Place West in 2022. And
this is kind of the next iteration where we further refined it.
And each time we've kind of added new kind of levels of detail
and asked some slightly different questions. But the land-use
issue is exactly one of the reasons we've done this. So really
what we're trying to do is question the premise of whether or not
we really need to make these huge trade offs between conservation
and climate.


David Roberts


I think the conventional wisdom is that if we switch from fossil
fuels to renewables there are a lot of advantages. But one of the
disadvantages is you need a bunch of land and you're going to end
up consuming a bunch of crop land or environmentally sensitive
land or land that the locals don't want you on. All this kind of
stuff. And so your take is that that stuff is exaggerated. So
what is the power of place? What is it meant to convey?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah, it's not to say that it's exaggerated, it's real, it's
happening. The question is how much of it is avoidable?


David Roberts


Right.


Jessica Wilkinson


So what we are seeking to do is ask that question do we need to
make all these huge trade offs for nature and for people on the
path to decarbonization? So we've asked in Power of Place, it's a
modeling exercise and you can ask the model, okay, go achieve net
zero emissions by 2050, economy-wide. And model please kind of
exclude these environmental data layers and let's see if that
changes, whether we can get there, the pace at which we get to
that goal and what the cost differential is.


David Roberts


Right before we jump into what you found, how would you describe
the status quo of land-use planning and energy?


Jessica Wilkinson


This is a relatively new land-use, right? I mean, this is not
something a lot of communities have seen before. They're leasing
it for the first time and they may be seeing it come at them
really quickly. And so there is a response. Just like local
governments adopt local land-use planning and zoning for
industrial uses, for commercial uses, for residential uses, they
are adopting ordinances to ensure that the renewable energy is
going to places where that community would prefer to have it. So
we are seeing a lot of local ordinances go up around the country.


There have been projections from NREL. That report they released
recently said that there were 3,000 local governments that
adopted ordinances. And I think it's important to keep in mind
that just because this is happening, just because these ordinance
are being adopted doesn't necessarily mean that they're being
adopted to block wind and solar. In every case, some of them are
again, just a natural reaction to land-use planning and a desire
to direct it to places that the community feels is most
appropriate. Certainly, and the NREL study from 2022 showed that
some of them are overly restrictive and likely intended to be.


But I think it's important not to assume that just because there
is an ordinance, it was intended to block renewables.


David Roberts


To what extent is this response and there is a very widespread
backlash happening. To what extent is that a fair critique of the
way renewable energy has been planned and cited thus far? And to
what extent is it just sort of an inevitable reaction to social
change?


Jessica Wilkinson


Right. We have looked at this and we do think that more or less
about half of the renewable energy that is being deployed now is
in areas that at least the Nature Conservancy might consider to
be highly sensitive to wildlife inhabitant.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's a lot.


Nels Johnson


I'll just add one sort of thought here about where are we today
in terms of planning for this major infrastructure build-out
that's coming our way? So first of all, just the scale of it is
really huge. It's something like on the order of the interstate
highway system that we built between the, in terms of the land
area, in terms of the investment, in terms of the pervasive
effects, mostly for good. But if it's not done in the right
places, it can cause adverse impacts to natural areas, to local
communities. So one way of thinking of this is we plan a lot for
transportation, for housing, for commercial and residential
development.


And up until now, we really haven't done spatially explicit
energy planning. And that's one of the things we're hoping to
accomplish with this series of power place studies is encouraging
at all levels. Utilities, state energy offices, the federal
government, regional transmission organizations, all to get more
explicit about where are the best places to put all this
infrastructure, and engaging the public at the community level,
variety of levels to provide input into that planning.


David Roberts


Well, it does seem like if you sort of measure the amount of
backlash that has been produced by the amount of renewable energy
so far, and then you multiply that by the amount of renewable
energy we're going to try to build over the next decade or two,
if you apply that same multiplier to the backlash, that's a very
big backlash. Right. I guess part of the point here is that it's
less, maybe less about poor planning than just no planning.
There's just not a lot of coordinated planning around the
renewable energy build-out yet.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, I think that's fair to say that right now there's very
little planning that the public has an opportunity to engage in
and that needs to change to promote wider acceptance of this
build-out. People have to have a voice in what that energy future
looks like for them and they need to be reassured that they're
going to get benefits out of the development that's taking place
and that the energy isn't just being produced in their backyard
and sent hundreds of miles away to a different user.


David Roberts


I want to come back to this question of public participation
because I have a few troubled thoughts about it. But first, so
this report, this is a national report and you created several
different scenarios for different kinds of pathways to zero
carbon by 2050, which have varying impacts on sensitive lands.
And sort of like you did these increments like here's, we can
avoid 10% of these damages, 20% of these damages, all the way up
to 90%. So one question I had about the scenarios up front was
because I feel like this is another sort of mythology that's
floating around is in any of these scenarios, did you run into an
absolute shortage of good land?


In other words, did you at any point encounter like there's just
not enough suitable places to build enough renewable energy to do
what we're talking about doing? Did that come up at all?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah, I mean, you'll see that kind of our big take home message
that we really lead with is that we can get to net zero emissions
by 2050 while avoiding impacts to most natural and working lands.
Not all, but most. And we recognize that there still are going to
be trade offs. However, what this study did show is that we can
reduce those trade offs significantly with some better planning.
So there won't be none, there won't be zero trade offs. We think
we can reduce those trade offs significantly and but by doing
that, by reducing environmental and social trade offs, we really
can accelerate the renewable energy build-out and avoid some of
that conflict, which some of which is unnecessary.


Nels Johnson


We've found that there is enough land for all of those scenarios
to get built. What's important to recognize is that wind is
probably the most land intensive of these technologies. And so as
you reduce impacts, you do start to constrain wind a little bit
more. But even so, there's more than enough land for wind to be
accommodated. So for example, in the Power Place West report, we
found that there was three times the amount of land available for
low impact wind sighting in the western United States. Even under
the most protective approach to natural areas and agricultural
lands, we would still have more than enough to accommodate wind.


David Roberts


Right. So whatever land issues we run into, not having enough
land is not going to be one of them. Because I think people have
in their head some very inflated ideas about because this stuff
about land-use has been floating around so long. I think people
have very inflated ideas about the amount of land required and
just thought we should clear that up front. There's enough land.


Nels Johnson


Yeah. And with solar in particular, we have lots and lots of
flexibility for where we put solar.


David Roberts


What the report shows is here's the energy mix for a 10%
reduction in land impacts, 20%, 30%, 40%. And as you are moving
up that scale and avoiding more and more of these impacts. What
you see is that wind declines and solar grows. So insofar as you
are taking land-use impacts into account, you are shifting
somewhat from wind to solar, at least relative to sort of
baseline projections. I just want to know why that is, because
it's a little bit counterintuitive to me, because my impression
is, and I think a lot of people's impression is that solar takes
the most land, is the most sort of like sprawling per kilowatt.


So why is it that when you restrict land-use to more appropriate
swathes of land, why do you shift from wind to solar? Just maybe
explain that a little bit more.


Nels Johnson


Well, so the main reason, David, is that solar project actually
are much more efficient in the use of land compared to wind. So,
for example, a wind project that's 100 megawatts needs about
9,200 acres to accommodate those turbines. Those turbines have to
be separated by a certain distance so they don't interfere with
each other. And so you need a project area, about 9,200 acres. A
solar project the same size 100 megawatts nameplate capacity
needs about 430 acres. So it's significantly smaller. Now, within
that wind project area, of course, not all the area is being
impacted. In fact, only about 3% of it is.


You have the turbines and you have the road, and you have a power
line that's connecting it all to the main grid, and those areas
in between are available for agriculture. Right? So wind is
really compatible with agriculture, but when it comes to species,
when it comes to habitats, that's not always true. So when, for
example, you clear a turbine pad, if it's in a forest, for
example, you create what's called an edge effect, and that
extends about 400 feet into the forest. And so that area is no
longer good habitat for a variety of species, and it changes the
kinds of plants that will grow there and other things.


David Roberts


But even so, if you're only impacting 3% of that 9,200 acres, I
mean, even if you have little islands of impact around the
turbines, it still seems like a relatively small area that you're
impacting them.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, of course, it depends on the species. So when you take
prairie chickens, lesser prairie chickens and greater prairie
chickens, they're both very sensitive to tall structures in
grassland environments because tall structures are associated
with places that hawks and eagles can see. And so they have an
aversion to being in areas near large tall objects, including
wind turbines. So that area is larger than the separation
distance from those turbines. I see. That's kind of the indirect
or displacement effect we see for certain species. So bottom line
is, wind is very compatible with agriculture. It's less
compatible with some species, particularly birds and bats.


David Roberts


Speaking of compatibility with agriculture, let's talk a little
bit about ... Jessica, one of the things the report does is focus
on a couple of strategies, I guess, to build out renewable energy
in such a way as to impact lesser use. One of those is
colocation. One of those is agrovoltaics. Can you maybe just tell
us real quick what those two are and why the report sort of
singled those out?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah. So this Power Place National really, again, was an
evolution from some previous work where we were trying to ask
some novel questions. And this issue in particular land saving
approaches, really is a novel approach to decarbonization
scenario planning. And what we wanted to do is in addition to
considering how the mix of technologies changes the footprint, we
wanted to consider how land saving approaches and there's a lot
of different land saving approaches out there. One could argue
nuclear is a land saving approach, but we wanted to consider how
some land saving approaches could again affect the overall
footprint and therefore kind of maybe by reducing that footprint,
reduce some conflict.


And the three kinds of land saving approaches that we're able to
really kind of dig into because the data were there were
agrovoltaics colocation of wind and solar and then fix tilt
solar. So those are the three that we really kind of dove into
deeply.


David Roberts


And was that because you thought that those were the three most
potent or just three common ones? Or why those three?


Jessica Wilkinson


There was robust data that was robust enough for us to consider
this. This is the first time folks have taken a stab at this. So
it's pretty novel approach. And for the colocation of wind and
solar there, we're looking at wind and solar on the same project
area. And when we looked at this approach, it was really
promising for agrovoltaics. It's again an apportment and
promising strategy for producing food and generating solar energy
on the same land. Not all crops are compatible.


David Roberts


Just so listeners know what we're talking about, agrivoltaics is
just putting solar panels on agricultural land, on the same land
where food is being grown.


Jessica Wilkinson


Exactly. And it's very popular conceptually. It's not like, at
the moment, super scalable. But we wanted to ask how much more
agrivoltaics could we do as a way to again get some of these
co-benefits? And what we did find was that by using agrivoltaics
we could grow the amount of agrovoltaics we currently are
projected to have from 216 square miles to about 600 square
miles. So that's a significant increase.


David Roberts


It's a significant increase. But is it a significant impact in
the context of the overall land-use picture? Like, is this a big
player in the final mix, do you think?


Nels Johnson


It's not currently a big player. And we don't project it to be
under the assumptions we used. We do think it has the potential
to grow with technological innovations and more incentives and
more experience. So, for example, agrivoltaics that we looked at
primarily are focused on fruit and vegetable crops there is some
evidence that potatoes, wheat, cattle can benefit from
agrivoltaics too, but there's just not enough data for us to be
able to model the effects of agrivoltaics in those settings. But
hopefully over the next few years we'll start to see more
experience and that may expand the role that agrivoltaics can
play in the future.


David Roberts


Why agrovoltaics and not aggri-wind, wind-agra, whatever the wind
equivalent is? It seems like I mean, intuitively there's so much
space between wind turbines, it seems almost more sensible to try
to do agriculture amidst the wind. Is that not a thing?


Nels Johnson


It is a thing. And in fact, a fair amount of the wind that's
being deployed now is in agricultural landscapes. And that's what
we show as well. The area that we show being directly impacted in
agriculture, that's cropland, that's a subset of the most
productive, at least from a human food point of view, areas
croplands, about 2% of them we project could be directly impacted
by 2050. But that indirect impact or the area of agriculture
that's in wind projects is going to be significantly larger than
that. But that land benefits potentially from those wind turbines
because the farmer or the rancher is getting an income stream not
just from the agriculture they're doing between the wind
turbines, but also the revenue they get for leasing land for that
energy production.


David Roberts


People understand the land saving benefits of agrivoltaics are
very sort of intuitively obvious. Similarly with colocation, like
if you put the wind and solar in the same place, then you don't
need two places. It seems straightforward enough. But what's the
deal with this fixed tilt solar? Explain that a little bit. The
land saving benefits, what's involved there?


Nels Johnson


The main land saving benefit from fixed versus tracking is that
the fixed panels are able to be packed together in tighter rows
than the tracking. The tracking needs more space between the rows
of PV panels in order to do that tracking. So that makes those
tracking panels have a higher capacity to convert sunlight into
energy. You can actually squeeze more energy capacity into the
same amount of land using fixed PV. So at least in areas where
there's not that much difference in the capacity advantage for
tracking over fixed, fixed can be one of your land saving
approaches because it uses somewhat less land than the ...


David Roberts


Oh, interesting, that is not at all what I would have predicted.
I would have predicted that tracking because it has higher
capacity, because it produces more power, you just need less of
it and thus would cover less land. But that turns out to be
wrong.


Nels Johnson


Well, except as you go further south, then the advantage for the
tracking really starts to pay off, including and exceeds what you
can gain by packing more fixed into the same amount of area.
Because that tracking differential, once you're further south in
the southwest, places like Nevada or places like Georgia and
Florida, there you're always going to have tracking is going to
be the technology of choice. Fix probably doesn't make sense in
those kinds of settings.


David Roberts


Interesting. Okay, so the report takes sort of a close look at
these three land saving, let's say, technologies fixed versus
tracking, agrivoltaics and colocation. But those are mostly just
novel inquiries to figure them out. The bulk of the land saving
that's done in these scenarios is by shifting the technology
balance. Is that fair? Like that's the primary instrument in what
is or is not saving some land.


Nels Johnson


So there are three steps that we kind of recommend. So one is use
environmental and social data no matter what technologies you're
using. Then look at those technologies you have available and
figure out which combination makes sense for your region, for
your landscape to achieve your climate goals, as well as your
conservation and local community goals. And that may involve
substituting solar for wind and maybe adding storage to the solar
so you can better make up for the gap that the wind might leave
behind.


And then the last is within those technologies that you have,
say, solar. What are your options for saving land, for example,
agrivoltaics. One thing I want to say about land saving
approaches are two things that we didn't model as variables, but
we assumed fairly high levels of implementation and that is
efficiency and distributed or rooftop solar. So we made some
pretty aggressive assumptions about how much rooftop solar will
be built by 2050. We assume that about 35% of available rooftops
would have solar 30 years from now, which is at the high end of
projections that are out there. And so it's a decent chunk of the
solar contribution, but it doesn't get us all the way to where we
need to go.


It gets us something like about 10% of how far we need to go.


David Roberts


But a big piece of land saving via solar is by moving the solar
onto rooftops.


Nels Johnson


It is an important piece and we should certainly support efforts
that make economic sense to get solar on rooftops because it
means there's somewhat less that has to go out in the landscape
somewhere else.


Jessica Wilkinson


But I would say if you look at the main kind of figure that shows
how total land-use impacts shift based on the different impact
reduction scenarios we looked at and how the mix of technologies
changes, I guess one way to look at it is we didn't challenge the
model super hard on pushing the envelope on rooftop. We asked the
model to kind of push the envelope as much as possible in
considering how shifting technologies makes a difference, how
agrovoltaics and colocation and switching from tracking to fixed
makes a difference. There's a lot of opportunity, I think really
to push the envelope more and challenge some of those assumptions
about rooftop solar and policy policies that we can get in place
really to kind of nudge us up as much as we possibly can because
ultimately that and energy efficiency are some of the best land
saving approaches.


David Roberts


Right. And energy efficiency, I guess, is obvious enough that
don't have to spell it out too much, but just the less energy you
use, the less you have to build, so the less land you use. Yeah,
I meant to ask about efficiency in rooftop solar because I
noticed that they were not highlighted, but those are the main
things I generally hear from people when they talk about how to
save lands. Another question, Jessica. You mentioned earlier that
you could view nuclear power as a land saving technology. This is
something you hear very frequently from nuclear fans, that it
uses tons less land than wind and solar for the same amount of
power.


So I was a little surprised. I mean, I guess I would have
expected that as you move toward reducing these impacts, you're
going to get lots and lots more nuclear out of the model. But
that didn't happen. It was a big shift from wind to solar, but
there wasn't really a huge shift in anything else. I guess sort
of bioenergy kind of declines sharply once you get up to avoiding
a bunch of impacts. But the main technology shift was from wind
to solar. So what explains that? Why not more nuclear if you're
trying to save land?


Jessica Wilkinson


I think it really comes down to cost.


David Roberts


Nuclear's old Achilles heel.


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah. And as part of this study, the modeling, we work very
closely with Evolved Energy and Montara Mountain Energy and Grace
Wu at UC Santa Barbara. And Evolved has the kind of energy
capacity modeling expertise. And so what we're telling the model
to do here is try and avoid natural and working lands as much as
you can model and consider cost. And so as we're seeing cost play
out in how the mix of technologies changes and it would select
nuclear if it were competitive from a cost point of view to more
wind and more solar.


David Roberts


So then a follow up question about that. Then you say rooftop
solar can save X amount, but advances in technology or policy, we
could and should push that higher in the name of saving land. Do
you take that same basic approach with nuclear? Like, would you
support reforms? Do you support reforms that make nuclear either
technologically, these smaller, allegedly cheaper nuclear plants
that are allegedly coming sometime soon, or just regulatory
reform? Do you support pushing the envelope on nuclear as well in
the name of land preservation?


Jessica Wilkinson


So the Nature Conservancy, kind of, has focused a lot on the
process also being incredibly important, having the local
communities have a very important role to play here. And this is
one of those technologies that for sure that we need to be
particularly sensitive about. But we do acknowledge that current
nuclear production is really necessary component of reducing
emissions in the short term and even possibly in the long term,
provided there are improvements for people and wildlife in the
cost, safety and environmental performance of nuclear technology
and as well as waste storage and mining practices.


David Roberts


Nels, one thing that jumps out at me as a longtime fan of
electrification is that the scenario that performs best in terms
of land preservation, sensitive land preservation, is the high
electrification scenario. Why is that?


Nels Johnson


Because it gives you more flexibility in how you get to net zero.
So you have a range of technologies, some of which are more
spatially efficient than others, and so that gives you the
option. So nuclear, for example, is one of those very efficient
options. And so as we reduce impacts, push really hard to reduce
impacts, the model starts to choose some additional nuclear
because it is so efficient.


David Roberts


So it does boost a little bit. Nuclear does get a little bit.


Nels Johnson


It about doubles the amount of nuclear that's online by 2050 when
we really work hard to reduce impact. So it's not a lot, but it
does increase somewhat. Keep in mind that the experience with the
small modular nuclear plants isn't in the commercial space yet,
so our data is very limited. And so the model just isn't able to
really get enough good data to make it a cost effective option.
Based on what we know now, that may change in the future. And
I'll just say that's true of all technologies. So could be
technology breakthroughs in lots of different places.


For example, I was listening to the show with Jamie Beard on
geothermal not too long ago, and that's one of those technologies
where there really could be a breakthrough that really makes it a
much more attractive way of getting to net zero. But currently
our data on geothermal is not exactly very promising in terms of
cost effectiveness. But there's some really interesting
innovations going on right now, really change that picture.


David Roberts


And it is notably light on land geothermal.


Nels Johnson


It is.


David Roberts


That is worth noting.


Nels Johnson


That isn't to say there aren't other issues, but generally it's
more spatially efficient. You do have to look at aquifer effects
and things like that and there can be things that are important
to really avoid or mitigate with geothermal. But yeah, overall
breakthroughs in geothermal could lead us to much more land
efficient approaches to getting to net zero in 30 years.


David Roberts


Jessica, what are energy communities and what role do they play
in this? One of the results is that if you move to this more land
sensitive approach, these more land sensitive scenarios, you end
up with more jobs in energy communities, which seems like a good
thing, but A. what's an energy community? And B. why do you end
up with more jobs in them?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah, so we didn't necessarily say anything about jobs, but when
we were working on the modeling and building the assumptions, we
had the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, so big deal. And
so we wanted to consider. How that tax credit that is included in
the Inflation Reduction Act would affect ... So IRA gives a 10%
tax credit for clean energy deployment in energy communities and
it has super wonky definition, as you would expect, it includes
areas with historic fossil fuel production and processing.


David Roberts


Right. So these are communities that were embedded in the fossil
fuel economy and we're worried about them because we're moving
away from fossil fuels.


Jessica Wilkinson


Right. And energy communities, the definition also included
brownfields. But treasury is still working out kind of the
technical definitions for a lot of this.


David Roberts


Right.


Jessica Wilkinson


Which made it hard when we were building this model several
months ago. But kind of the mapping that has been done around the
fossil fuel production aspects of energy communities is a little
bit clearer. So we looked only at those and we were able to model
areas again, those areas associated with historic fossil fuel
industries, as I mentioned, evolved models, the evolved energy
energies, their models takes into account kind of price. And we
weren't able to kind of build that 10% tax credit into the energy
model just because the rules haven't been set quite yet. Instead,
and we might get to this, we use this dynamic scoring approach in
this study and we basically put a finger on the scale in favor of
these communities.


We gave them a negative social impact score to just see whether
or not if we're incentivizing them, we see more of the renewable
energy build-out in these communities.


David Roberts


So kind of an attempt to simulate an incentive.


Jessica Wilkinson


Exactly. And what we did find was that when we do that, we do see
an additional 10% of the clean energy deployment being directed
to these communities. So about 32% of the total 2050 energy
portfolio in our scenario is built in these energy communities.
And under one of the scenarios we looked at most closely, the 70%
impact reduction scenario, 23 million people in those communities
— live in those communities that host clean energy projects
compared to 21 million people in the setting as usual scenario.
So we do see a larger percentage of the portfolio happening in
these communities and more people live in those communities.


When we again put our thumb on the scale for those energy
communities.


David Roberts


And are there land implications to that or is that just more
about social impacts?


Jessica Wilkinson


Sure, there's land implications as well. Yeah, so there's going
to be benefits to those communities and there'll be impacts as
well.


Nels Johnson


One thing I'll just point out about the energy communities, one
of the reasons why the modeling finds them very attractive for
energy development is because it's likely they have the
infrastructure and the energy capacity models out there looking
for places that have certain characteristics. And these energy
communities have the kinds of characteristics energy models
looking for. So that makes them relatively attractive for new
energy development. It's obviously a different kind of energy
development, but it can take advantage of some of the same
infrastructure. There are likely already existing transmission
lines. There's road access, there's a worker force nearby.


So that's partly why we see such a large proportion of the
build-out going to these communities.


David Roberts


And the land is sort of already affected.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, from a conservation point of view there's some benefit
because these communities often have lands that have been
previously developed for earlier forms of energy production.


David Roberts


Right. One other technical question is you're modeling finds as
all modeling finds that building out renewable energy to hit the
2050 target is going to require an extraordinarily large amount
of transmission infrastructure, new transmission infrastructure.
But you find that an approach that is sensitive to these land and
social impacts ends up using a lot more transmission, but a lot
less more than in the baseline scenario. So why is that? What is
it about being sensitive toward land that gets you less need for
transmission?


Nels Johnson


The main story there, David, is that as we're reducing impacts to
natural areas and to croplands, it's moving away from wind
projects, for example, in the Great Plains that are quite distant
from population centers where the energy demand is, to solar
projects that are typically located closer to population centers
and demand centers. So that is a big part of the explanation.


David Roberts


So the shift from wind to solar sort of carries a reduction in
transmission.


Nels Johnson


And then that reduces the transmission need both in terms of
interregional transmission movement because you don't have to
move as much between, for example, the Great Plains in the
Southeast, as one example, but also the gen-tie lines. These are
the lines that connect the wind project or the solar project onto
the grid. And so both of those transmission requirements goes
down. It's still a massive increase in what we have today. So we
need at least two and a half times, or three and a half times at
the upper end to move energy between regions of the country to
get to net zero.


So that is a massive expansion from where we are today. The last
two decades we saw very little expansion in transmission and
that's really going to have to change as we convert most of the
transportation fleet to electric vehicles. That is just going to
really require us to expand transmission to keep up with all that
new demand.


David Roberts


And given how difficult it is, that does seem to serve as a
recommendation for this sort of land sensitive approach since
anything that can avoid the need for transmission is probably
also going to avoid delays.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, and one thing we looked at more closely in the Power Place
West report, we didn't have the time and the computing power to
do it at the national level as much, but we looked at, well, what
are the forms of transmission expansion that are available? And
it's not just necessarily building a new line through a new right
of way, but it can be things like colocating new wires on
existing transmission towers. It can be reconductoring, that is,
replacing the steel cable with carbon cables. It can be using
what are called grid enhancing technologies that are software,
for example, or new conductors and things like that, which enable
the system that you already have to move more energy more
efficiently.


And then, for example, two way energy flows in places where you
only had one way energy flow. So all those things together we
found in the west could account for half of the transmission
capacity that we need to grow in the next 30 years. So that's a
really good news story that we can invest in these approaches
right here and now and make a big difference in that capacity
while trying to figure out where are those big new lines going to
go because we inevitably are going to need new transmission
lines.


David Roberts


Right, but we can get a lot of just to sum that up, we can get a
lot of new capacity without new lines or new land.


Nels Johnson


Yeah. So the idea here is to focus on those options as much as we
can now, to make as much progress as we can while the longer term
planning and investment for those new lines that inevitably are
needed can take place.


David Roberts


Right. Jessica, let's get to the $6 billion question on
everyone's mind, which is when you ramp up these strategies for
being more sensitive toward land, avoiding environmentally
sensitive land, avoiding adverse social impacts, how much is the
additional cost over and above sort of the baseline status quo
projections?


Jessica Wilkinson


Right. Well, at least the $1.87 trillion question. So existing
studies have shown that as resighting today using sighting as
usual scenario, the cost of meeting net zero emissions by 2050 is
$1.87 trillion. So a significant price tag and that scenario
where we use sighting as usual will also impact 250,000 sq mi of
land. So that's an area larger than the state of Texas. So we
looked at how under these kind of impact reduction scenarios from
setting as usual, ramping it up to a 90% impact reduction
scenario, how the cost change. And what we found was that half of
the impacts to land can be reduced.


So under that 70% impact reduction scenario, half of those
impacts can be reduced.


David Roberts


So that's half of wait, that's half of the amount of land is
going to be impacted.


Jessica Wilkinson


Yes. Under that 70% impact reduction.


David Roberts


Half of the 250 what you ...


Jessica Wilkinson


Yes.


David Roberts


250,000. So the 70% reduction case gets you down to 125 ...


Jessica Wilkinson


About right, yes.


David Roberts


... thousand acres?


Jessica Wilkinson


You save an area the size of Arizona. Not too bad.


David Roberts


And how much does it cost to save an Arizona-sized amount of land
from development?


Jessica Wilkinson


Right. So that comes at a 6.3% cost increase over the current
trajectory.


David Roberts


Interesting.


Jessica Wilkinson


And that's not nothing, particularly for lower income communities
and families. However, we really think that is kind of likely to
be pretty high because those costs may be offset by lower
cancellation rates, shorter permitting times, and lower
monitoring and mitigation costs. So into the sighting as usual
scenario, we expect a lot more conflict, and we see higher
cancellation rates, we see longer permitting times. If there's a
lot of both environmental and social kind of value in an area as
that Q and A defines it, and we think that although it comes at a
6.3% cost increase, it really can be kind of offset by some of
those lower cancellation rates.


David Roberts


To what extent does the model of the status quo incorporate those
conflicts? I mean, you sort of can't can't you're just sort of
guessing how big those impacts are going to be? But they're going
to be there, right? I mean, does the model take them into account
at all?


Jessica Wilkinson


It really can't. There's there have been a few studies that we've
relied upon that show kind of how much these, you know, sighting
in sensitive areas from an environmental perspective does drive
up the costs. And the studies that do exist demonstrate that when
projects are cited in the more environmental sensitive areas,
they have a higher cancellation rate, they have longer permitting
times, and as one would expect, more monitoring is required. And
there may be other kinds of ways to minimize impacts that would
be asked of the developer than if they were in an area that, for
example, was a mine land or a landfill or other kind of degraded
lands.


David Roberts


So you think 6.3% is what the model shows as additional cost, but
we think maybe the status quo modeling is underestimating costs
because it's not being able to predict all these conflicts over
land-use. So maybe the costs are closer to comparable than at
first blush. You think?


Nels Johnson


Yeah. David, those soft costs are just not really available for
monitoring. As Jessica said, we have some specific places where
we have pretty good evidence of what those costs are, but we just
don't have nationwide data. The other thing that's important to
notice is that we're also avoiding costs that are occurring when
we convert natural habitats or croplands. And there's a cost of
that, too, which isn't in the modeling.


David Roberts


Oh, you mean the cost of, like, lost nature?


Nels Johnson


Lost nature. If we could put a dollar price tag on that, if we
could.


David Roberts


So those aren't in the model at all. They're priced at zero.


Nels Johnson


They're not. We're just modeling technology and land costs when
it comes to these costs.


David Roberts


Right. So if you wanted to say that untouched land or unmolested
land has some value that you would destroy if you developed it,
that would change the final sort of cost balance outlook?


Nels Johnson


It could. We just wanted to take as narrow a view of costs as we
had really good data for just so that we could have an apples to
apples kind of comparison here. And that's why we limited
ourselves to data that's really well vetted and reliable and
that's the technology cost data and land cost.


David Roberts


Right, but I think it's fair to say that how you are going to
view that 6.3% additional cost varies quite a bit based on how
much you value land right. And how much you value untouched
natural land.


Nels Johnson


Absolutely. And by the way, in terms of those soft costs that we
talked about, project cancellation rates, permitting delays,
there's really an important business case to be made here and we
and others are working on that, but we just don't yet have the
nationwide data.


David Roberts


Right. The business case just being it's more sensible to go to
more appropriate land if for no other reason than to avoid the
hassle and blowback and lawsuits and et cetera.


Nels Johnson


Yeah, the way I've heard some energy developers call it, it's
kind of the land analytics. What is it about the place? You're
thinking about the analytics, about a bunch of data related to
that piece of land that relates to project success. There are
lots of analytics that wind or solar developers look at.


David Roberts


Do we know that? Is that sophisticated yet? Like, do we have a
good sense of the full characterization of land that ends up
being economic to develop?


Nels Johnson


We don't have good enough data. Companies probably have better
data than we're aware of because it's a business and that data
can be proprietary. But we think there are a growing number of
companies that actually are starting to pay attention to, as I
say, this notion of land analytics.


David Roberts


Interesting. And Jessica, one of the ongoing discussions, let's
say, areas of discourse in the clean energy world is about
NIMBY-ism and about community feedback. And the sort of gathering
conventional wisdom, I think, is that there's too much too many
ways for communities to slow and halt things, too many ways for
them to sue, too many laws and regulations that they can exploit.
And thus that, like NIMBY-ism has all the power. And part of the
solution is to move power out of local hands up higher on the
chain, up to the.


David Roberts


State or federal government.


David Roberts


But you in this report at the end recommend more public process,
more engagement with the public. So how do you square that? How
does that not end up slowing things down?


Jessica Wilkinson


Right, I mean, we think there needs to be a balance. We need to
make sure that the communities where this infrastructure is being
developed have a voice, not only that, but that they're
meaningfully engaged. And we also see a backlash when states try
to go too far in taking away that local community role. And it
can exacerbate, frankly, the backlash against renewable energy.
This transition is not going to happen in the next five years.
It's going to happen, we hope, as soon as possible, but it's
going to take a few decades. And we really need to have these
renewable energy developers have a long term social license to
operate.


So we need to be finding ways not only to get that balance right
between state control and local control, but we also need to make
sure that we get the balance right in terms of how we share the
benefits of this transition. And I think there's growing
recognition about that as well. I think there's some encouraging
signs there. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed
about $760,000,000 in grants to state and local governments for
economic development activities and communities affected by
transmission, actually. And I think New York State is a place
where they were trying to find the balance of that in their 2019
legislation, where they created this one stop permit review
process.


That is great. And then they also acknowledge that in order to be
eligible for that, you needed to demonstrate that you've
consulted, hopefully more than just consulted with the host
community and that you have a community benefit agreement in
place. We need to make sure that the local communities that may
be seeing a lot of this development in their communities are
sharing in the benefits as well.


David Roberts


Yeah, I feel like that's an underrepresented perspective in this
debate, which is that maybe if you engage communities earlier and
share more of the benefits with them, you could speed things up
and then maybe part of the slowness is your standard capitalist
rapaciousness trying to capture all the profit and not share any
with the communities involved. Like maybe you could speed things
up if you shared some of the money, basically.


Jessica Wilkinson


Absolutely.


Nels Johnson


We really want to emphasize that when developers do the right
thing, they show how they've avoided impacts, they show how they
are working with communities to deliver benefits that the
community wants they should be rewarded. And we think one of the
most effective ways to reward them is to get them at the head of
the queue in terms of permit review, in terms of interconnection
queues. Because if companies go beyond what some of their
competitors are doing to do the right thing, they need to be
rewarded for that.


David Roberts


Interesting. Well, that segues perfectly to my final question,
which is sort of what policy recommendations fall out of this?
One that seems very obvious is instead of not planning, let's
plan. What are the others? Jessica, what are the main sort of
policy recommendations that fall out of this for you?


Jessica Wilkinson


Yeah, so we really were thinking about our audience as being
those that do energy planning, state governor's offices and
energy offices. So we kind of thought about the recommendations
in terms of those audiences. And for energy planners at all
levels, local, state, regional, national, kind of our solution is
that they use the methodology outlined in Power Place to make
sure that as they're planning for a clean energy future, they're
doing so in a way that maximizes benefits to climate, to nature
and to people.


David Roberts


Are they just not doing that at all now? Is it land? Is this sort
of like environmental sensitivity of land, is that playing any
role at all in the planning right now?


Jessica Wilkinson


Only a little bit. I mean, to the extent that they do and there
have been some states that have they maybe are taking off the
table, like in the way that you are telling the model avoid this
place if you can, if you can't, but take it into consideration.
They will, for example, include those lands that are currently
off the table, like national parks and wildlife refuges and that
really are off the table, but they tend to not include those
other lands that maybe aren't regulated in that same sense.
They're not designated as high priority conservation areas but we
know they're really important either because they're wetlands or
they are endangered species habitat or are lands that are going
to be important under the changing climate to ensure that we have
resilient and connected land in the future.


David Roberts


So the first recommendation is just take this into account when
planning.


Jessica Wilkinson


Take this into account, use the high resolution conservation,
land-use and demographic data that we do have. And then for
policymakers, what we show in some of the particularly in the
regional snapshots we have in this report is that different
geographies are going to need different incentives and we need to
tailor those incentives to the particular geographies and the
specific kind of conditions. Is it highly agricultural? Is it
amenable to agrovoltaics? We're going to need to adopt incentives
to encourage the right mix of technologies and land saving
approaches that make the most sense in those geographies. And
then as Nels alluded to for those projects that are well designed
and have lower environmental, social and economic risk, we do
think that it's appropriate for them to be able to jump the line,
not cut the line, but get to the front line for interconnection
consideration and for environmental and environmental review and
permitting.


Nels Johnson


And it's really important to recognize that there are states
where this is starting to happen. New York, California in
particular have explicit approaches to avoiding and minimizing
environmental and social impacts.


David Roberts


What are they using? Is it just like a financial incentive or is
it a jump the queue kind of thing or what? Do we know what works?


Jessica Wilkinson


I think we're still learning. We're very much in the learning
stage. There are states that incentivize provide incentives to
solar developers, for example, that build on landfills and mine
lands and brownfields. There's a lot of great examples of that.
Does it solve the problem? No, probably not. But it certainly
helps. And then New York was that example where they do have this
one stop shopping for renewable energy permitting if you are
consulting with the community and demonstrate that if you have a
community benefit agreement. So we are seeing a lot of really
interesting innovation and I think we're in an exciting time
right now to try and get this right.


And now is the time we really need to get it right.


David Roberts


Yeah. Before we headlong into this stampede of growth, which just
makes as someone who has become, over time sensitive to these
possibilities for blowback, just the whole prospect of this giant
wave coming, just the number of possible problems, it just makes
me clench up.


Jessica Wilkinson


I think our findings are really encouraging. We we can avoid a
lot of these impacts, we believe, but we need to get the planning
and the policy incentives right, and we need to do it now.


David Roberts


Awesome. Okay, well, that's a perfect note to wrap up on. Jessica
Wilkinson and Nels Johnson, thanks so much for coming, this
fascinating report.


Nels Johnson


Thank you.


Jessica Wilkinson


Thanks so much for having us, David.


David Roberts


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