Not so green: Renewable energy’s land use problem

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Wind and solar power require clearing vast swaths of wildlife habitat.
Left-leaning politicians, celebrities, and big corporations are clamoring for the country to convert to renewable energy. But getting rid of fossil fuels isn’t as easy as flipping a switch and, despite wind and solar energy’s green reputation, they come with some serious but little-known environmental consequences.

Wind and solar are what experts call “diffuse.” This means it takes a lot of wind turbines and solar panels to produce a given amount of energy. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are very energy dense. It would take 9 times the land to replace a single natural gas power plant with the equivalent amount of electric generation from solar panels, and 38 times as much land for wind.

To put this in perspective, powering the entire nation with wind and solar would require over 42 million acres — 18 times the size of Yellowstone National Park! This is at least 10 times the land footprint of our current energy system. The environmental destruction this effort would cause cannot be overstated.

How did we come by this number? In a recent study, Life:Powered used publicly available wind and solar production data to calculate how much land would be required to take Texas 100% renewable by 2030, assuming that feat would even be possible. The answer is about 6 million acres. Texas consumes about a seventh of the nation’s electricity, meaning the entire nation would take at least 42 million acres — but likely more because Texas’ landscape and weather is better suited to wind and solar than most other states.

Just imagine what clearing 18 Yellowstones worth of land would mean for our ecosystems — wildlife habitat destroyed, species threatened, and our natural beauty scarred by turbines, mirrored panels, and untold miles of unsightly transmission lines.

Fossil fuels produce a much larger amount of affordable, reliable energy with much smaller physical footprint on the land — something environmental activists should know about.
https://lifepowered.org/not-so-green-renewable-energys-land-use-problem/

This is not really an issue with the liberals who live in the cities.

They believe flyover country is pretty well empty so planting endless rows of wind turbines or solar farms is a good thing.

[Joe Wooten]

They believe flyover country is pretty well empty so planting endless rows of wind turbines or solar farms is a good thing.

AND....
1) Food comes from a grocery store
2) Water comes from a faucet