Land use requirements for the power sector considering renewable energy development and water consumption in China.

Abstract

In 2020, China pledged to peak its carbon emission before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. These ambitious carbon targets will inevitably boost the development of renewable energy generation, which has advantages from energy and water perspectives but disadvantages from land use perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the interaction among renewable energy development, water consumption as well as land use in the power sector, and determine a reasonable power-related land use range for the land administration in China. In this research, a series of multi-period, multi-regional power system optimization models with different objective functions and constraints are established to study the interrelationship among renewable energy development, water consumption, and land use in the coverage area of China Southern Power Grid from 2018 to 2030, and provide a reasonable land use range for the power sector in this region in 2030. Based on the above calculation results, the development of renewable energy promoted by energy and water policies will increase the land use of power sector under a cost objective function, and the minimum land area demand for this power system in 2030 considering energy and water policies is 24785.14 km2. What is more, according to the influence of land use constraint on the total cost of power sector from 2018 to 2030, this paper selected the increase ratio from 5 to 16% compared with the minimum land area demand as the reasonable land use range.