Huge wind farms use much less land than you might think

This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.

To meet the Biden administration’s goal of weaning the electric grid off fossil fuels by 2035, the United States needs to add more wind farms. But finding places to put turbines has emerged as a major hurdle, due in part to the perception that wind farms require large amounts of land.

The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land.

“Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things … can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people,” said Sarah Jordaan, the study’s principal investigator.

Finding the right site for a wind farm

Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study’s findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.

The researchers analyzed roughly 300 wind farms with more than 15,000 turbines in total that feed a grid that provides electricity to 80 million people across 14 U.S. states and parts of Canada and Mexico. They found that a lot of the time wind farms share the landscape with farming.

Wind farms that piggybacked on existing infrastructure, such as roads, disrupted less land and were about seven times more efficient than projects constructed from the ground up, according to the study. “Our results should provide stakeholders with a greater evidence base for a more informed understanding of the impacts of energy developments,” she said.

Ben Hoen, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab, who was not involved in the research, said the findings emphasize the potential benefits of building turbines on shared land. One major concern about renewable energy projects, he said, has been that they could displace or disrupt farming, hurting the local economy.

“This study might allow folks to take a fresh look at the ability to retain some of that economic benefit that agriculture has while still co-developing or developing wind energy at those locations,” Hoen said.

Other barriers for wind energy

But experts said it remains a question whether this new data will spur greater acceptance of wind projects, which can face opposition in communities for other reasons the study didn’t take into account, such as noise.

“On the ground, the trade-offs related to energy development are complex,” Jordaan said. “For wind, it includes issues like visual impacts, noise, and bird and bat mortality. How people evaluate these trade-offs is complex.”

Much of the public though appears to be supportive of renewable energy projects, including wind turbines. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted last year reported that large and bipartisan majorities of Americans said they wouldn’t mind fields of solar panels and wind turbines being built in their communities.

The new study comes as the country is undergoing an energy transition toward more renewable sources. In January, the Energy Information Administration forecast that wind and solar energy will lead growth in U.S. power generation for the next two years.

“There’s no denying that wind and solar deployment is going to take up land,” Hoen said. “But I do think that understanding the actual impacts and taking into account some of these co-use opportunities — whether it’s roads or agriculture — are extremely important.”