By Jonathan Lesser
In March, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation, called the SITE Act, which will allow thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines to be sited over state and local objections, and allow developers to take privately owned lands through eminent domain. The stated goal is to enable the development of vast quantities of heavily subsidized wind and solar power in rural areas and transmit it to cities where the electricity is needed to meet unrealistic and costly electrification mandates, such as those in California and New York.
The New York Times, for one, is celebrating. Forcing rural states, which many Times readers deride as “flyover country,” to supply the electricity needs of coastal urban ones is seen by the Times as rural states’ obligation. In a May 4, 2023, editorial, the Times wrote, “To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work.” Authority for siting new transmission lines would be under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which already has authority over siting of new natural gas pipelines.
That same editorial also stated, “The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.” Given the actions taken in the past by the Bureau of Land Management, which has prevented ranchers from grazing on millions of acres of federally owned lands; the Forest Service, which last year began a prescribed burn on a windy day, despite please not to, and caused the largest wild fire in New Mexico’s history; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers every stream, pond, and arroyo to be a regulated wetland, many in rural states would likely disagree.
Yet, the Times never objected to New York’s rejection of two natural gas pipelines – the Constitution Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline – by the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Those pipelines would have transported natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania (New York has banned hydraulic fracturing in the portion of the Marcellus that underlies the state) to New York and New England states, which would have lowered costs to consumers and businesses. But even though FERC has siting authority for natural gas pipelines, New York was able to torpedo new pipelines by claiming they will adversely affect water quality.
According to the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC), there are around 240,000 miles of high-voltage (greater than 200 kilovolts) transmission lines today. In its most recent assessment of electric system reliability, NERC projected that a total of about 17,000 miles would be added over the next 10 years.
That amount of new transmission pales in comparison to what will be required to fulfil the Biden Administration’s net-zero carbon emissions goals. According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), which sponsored a 2020 Princeton study titled “Net Zero America,” accommodating the new wind and solar power envisioned to meet the Administration’s net zero goals will require almost quadrupling today’s high-voltage transmission capacity by 2050.
In a February 2023 report, DOE estimated that, by 2035, transmission capacity would have to be increased by about 60 percent – about 140,000 miles, or over 11,000 miles per year. The full 2050 buildout would require adding well over 500,000 miles of new transmission lines, some 20,000 miles each year at a cost of over $2.5 trillion, roughly $100 billion annually. And that doesn’t include the costs for the backup power supplies needed to compensate for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
DOE’s goal is to have over 900,000 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaics and over 500,000 MW of on-land wind generation by 2035. By the end of last year, a total of just over 70,000 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) and 141,000 MW of on-land wind had been installed in the last 20 years. So, DOE’s goal is roughly seven times the total installed through the end of 2022.
The amount of land that will be required for this solar and wind generation is huge because they both have low “power densities.” Power density is a measure of the amount of electric generating capacity for a unit of area. For wind turbines, regardless of their size, power density is around 0.9 watts per square meter, equivalent to 3.6 kilowatts (kW) per acre. Solar PV has a higher power density, about 5.7 watts per square meter, or 22 kW per acre. By comparison, nuclear power plants have a power density of around 1,600 kW per acre.
Thus, fulfilling the Administration’s goals will require almost 140 million acres of land for 500,000 MW of wind and 41 million acres of land for 900,000 MW of solar PV.
High-voltage transmission lines require lots of land, too. The SITE legislation refers to 500 feet of land on each side of a line for the right-of-way. On average, the power density for a high-voltage transmission line is about 30 watts per square meter, which translates into about 21 acres of land per mile. Building 500,000 additional miles of transmission lines thus will require over 10 million acres of land. In total, the amount of land needed for wind and solar, even if the solar is co-located with wind turbines, will be larger than the area Montana and North Dakota combined. And the 10 million acres of transmission line right-of-way is larger than the combined areas of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Green energy cheerleaders like The New York Times are demanding that rural Americans sacrifice their land to “save” the planet. But even if one believes carbon emissions are leading to a climate “catastrophe” (they aren’t) and even if U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell to zero tomorrow, the impact on world climate would be minuscule. That’s according to John Kerry, the former senator from Massachusetts and currently President Biden’s climate “czar.”
A far better way to reduce carbon emissions would be nuclear power plants. Building new, modular nuclear plants (small-sized ones of around 50 MW that can be built at a factory) and installing them near cities, would provide lower-cost and highly reliable electricity, while avoiding the need to carpet the rural west with wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines.
But don’t expect The New York Times to ever endorse that strategy.
Jonathan Lesser, Ph.D., is the president of Continental Economics and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Originally published by RealClearEnergy. Republished with permission.
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