Coming Soon to a Landscape You Loved

Wind and solar don’t work most of the time.?And even when they work, they are extremely diluted energy sources that require 100x to 1,000x more space for the same energy produced from reliable primary energy sources like fossil fuels and nuclear energy.?With a large majority of current power capacity additions mandated as renewables, they will take up lots of our space, mostly just sitting there.?

The “packing of power” I refer to is in the form of power density, or the power per unit of land area, often expressed in Watts per acre or Watts per square meter.???

Several studies about power density have been released over the years, most notably by Vaclav Smil .?In the graph below, we take his power density data of various publications by Ridley, Van Zalk & Behrens , and Noland et al ., together with averages for each primary energy category.?Note there are order-of-magnitude differences in power densities. That’s why many of the upcoming plots are on a logarithmic scale, where it is easy to 1,000x differences in a single graph.?Primary power sources are sorted by power density, from about 0.1 W/m2 for crops all the way up to more than 1,000 W/m2 for nuclear power.

While a logarithmic scale is useful, it does not do justice to visualize massive differences.?That’s why I show actual land use to generate 10 MW of power on a satellite image taken of the northern side of the city of Denver, Colorado.?

The left side shows a 6.4-acre pad near E 168 Avenue with 26 horizontal wells that produce from the Niobrara / Codell, covering about 2 square miles about 7,000 ft below the subsurface where they do not interfere with our daily lives.?The 10 MW of power comes from 0.5% land use.

Note the E&P industry is constantly moving to take up less space.?In the Williston Basin in North Dakota, for example, our industry went from single-pad, 1-mile lateral wells to drilling pads with up to 12 wells that are 3-mile laterals, covering 6 square mile area from a single location, requiring less than 0.1% of land use with impact on agricultural land.

Achieving the same average power from renewable sources requires as much as 40 square miles for growing corn for ethanol.?Assuming wind turbines work 25% of the time, a 40 MW wind farm is needed to obtain an average of 10 MW in power. That requires about 4 square miles, some of it with a possibility for secondary use, for 20 2-MW wind turbines.?Assuming an average capacity for solar of 16% (working 27 hours per week), we need a 60 MW solar plant that occupies 0.8 square miles, to get to the same average power of 10 MW.

The differences in land use are enormous, require from 80x more land for solar to a whopping 4,000x more land need for corn ethanol.?Oil & gas packs a massive punch.

Now let’s use this power density to think about a countries’ energy situation and how it can be self-sufficient in its energy needs.?Citizens have a current standard of living and associated energy consumption per capita they want to maintain, but they are constrained by a fixed amount of land and population size.?

The chart below combines all this, plotting energy consumption per capita vs population density.?It was originally devised by David MacKay on www.withouthotair.com .?I plotted datapoints for countries, with bubble size proportional to their population and color assigned by continent. On the vertical axis, impoverished countries with low per-capita energy consumption plot low and wealthy countries plot high.?On the horizontal axis, countries with lots of space plot left and countries with lots of people plot right.

Also, I added diagonal lines that represent power density, and I included diagonal bands for ranges in primary power based on data from the first graph.

This is a complicated chart, so let’s break it down by looking at a few countries:

• Namibia, on the lower left.?This poor country has lots of land, a small population, low energy consumption per capita, and therefore a relatively low power consumption density of 0.003 W/m2.?Provided crops could grow there, that the sun shines enough and there is battery backup, or that the wind blows regularly and has enough backup, all these primary energy sources could theoretically be used for energy self-sufficiency.?
• Singapore, on the other extreme at the top right of the chart, has a high living standard that requires lots of energy per capita, has lots of people, but not much land.?The power consumption density is five orders of magnitude higher than in Namibia at about 200 W/m2.?The color bands for renewable primary power sources all lie left of Singapore’s datapoint on the graph, meaning there is no way to be self-sufficient using these diluted sources.?It needs to select dense primary power sources like oil & gas and nuclear at the top right corner to be self-sufficient.?While Singapore is a City State, it reflects the general challenge of cities anywhere – the power consumption densities of a city are so high that it needs to use ultra-dense power sources, or it needs to get its power from land elsewhere. If you want to take this challenge to another extreme – the power consumption of the Freedom Tower will not be satisfied by a windmill on its roof.
• The Netherlands, like many Western European countries, lies toward the top right, with high per capita energy use, lots of people on a stamp-size piece of land.?The Netherlands’ power consumption density is about 3.3 W/m2 – higher than the average power density of wind.?For those who would like to pave the Netherlands with windmills, there is not enough land available to meet domestic consumption.?
• United States.?While the standard of living is high and there are a lot of people, there is also quite a bit of land available.?The US’ power consumption density is only about 0.3 W/m2, meaning there are a lot of options available to meet demand in power.?

Options that can also lead to frivolous land use.?The 100x to 1,000x differences in power density between renewables and fossil fuels / nuclear lead to incredibly lobsided land use.

About 9% of US land is used to provide 97 quads (quadrillion Btu) of power consumption , some of it from multi-use land.?As shown in the graph below, while renewables only provide 13% of all primary power, they use as much of 99.4% of all US land used for power generation.?The vast majority of primary power, 87%, that comes from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, only uses 0.6% of US land used for power generation.

Note that this graph does not account for multiple land use.?For example, land used for hydroelectric power generation provides an opportunity for tourism, recreation and drinking water.?Some people report oil & gas lease land as opposed to land used for oil and gas operations – which makes a huge difference as lease lands pertain to bottomhole access, as opposed to the small footprint needed at the surface of the earth.?While solar needs lots of land, it can be used on roofs, but all useable roofs in the US are not nearly enough for the current 0.5% land used by solar.?

Unfortunately, this lopsided land use will get a lot worse over the next few decades due to governments mandating additional power capacity to be mostly renewable.?

While US wind already uses 80,000 square miles, or about 2.4% of US land, the expected addition of about 200 GW of installed capacity every decade (~50 GW effective), will require an extra 0.6% of US land every decade.?

Consider the Evers Plan for powering Wisconsin .?It calls for 48 GW onshore wind power by 2050, which requires about 7% of the State of Wisconsin’s land.?

Or consider fringe academic plans , for example from Stanford University, that claim a wind-water-solar only plan can power us all reliably, amongst others by requiring an additional 1 TW US onshore wind by 2050. While the land use footprint would be relatively small, spacing requirements (~64 acres/MW) would place mostly idle wind turbines over an extra 3% of US land.

If it wasn’t for the massive increases in our energy system cost, the birds and whales being killed, the need for exotic metals and poly-crystalline silicon from countries with labor issues, renewables could possibly be tolerated. If it wasn’t for the fact that renewables use large quantities of diesel for mining and metal extraction, use coal for steel, and need vast quantities of concrete to build, we could see renewables as a “green” energy source.?Green strategists do not seem to worry we are trading self-sufficiency with fossil fuels for foreign dependency on critical elements.?Facts that energy-guzzling green fans in cities prefer to ignore.?

Frivolous land use is par for the course.?The mandate to occupy land is already causing divisions between rural and urban populations in many developed countries.?Robert Bryce ’s Renewables Rejection Database lists a growing number of projects, with more than 500 rejected wind and solar projects, mostly in “flyover country”, to date.?

Land use can be minimized by moving wind turbines offshore, but this harsh environment poses higher than expected wear and tear on components, challenging manufacturer profit margins and the typical 20-year life expectancy of critical components .?

Another solution for massive land requirements is to use other people’s land.?US States and European countries with high levels of renewable penetration rely on their neighbors when renewables do not work, while they dump renewable electricity on their neighbors’ market when they have too much.?In extremis, some countries resort to neo-colonialism: Germany recently got into an agreement with Namibia , a former colony, to build a wind park there, and use excess power to generate hydrogen that can be shipped back to Germany.

Vestas proudly states it has led onshore wind power to “new heights”. Proponents of wind power say it can be used on farm land, where land can still be used for livestock grazing and agriculture.?While that may be true, they should also consider that farmers will see those windmills from as far as 20 miles away, and that they may feel their bad vibrations more than half a mile away.

Dense energy production systems like fossil fuels and nuclear energy help conserve space for other things, including undisturbed nature.?Renewables encroach onto the things we would like to keep “natural” and undisturbed.?Let’s hope we will be more effective than Don Quixote to keep these diluted monstrosities out of all our backyards.

Thank you to Howard Melcher and Larry Griffin for some of the ND and DJ oilfield pad production and power density calculations.