Supply-side options to reduce land requirements of fully renewable electricity in Europe.

Tim Tröndle,Baogui Xin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0236958

Abstract

Renewable electricity can fully decarbonise the European electricity supply, but large land requirements may cause land-use conflicts. Using a dynamic model that captures renewable fluctuations, I explore the relationship between land requirements and total system cost of different supply-side options in the future. Cost-minimal fully renewable electricity requires some 97,000 km2 (2% of total) land for solar and wind power installations, roughly the size of Portugal, and includes large shares of onshore wind. Replacing onshore wind with offshore wind, utility-scale PV, or rooftop PV reduces land requirements drastically with only small cost penalties. Moving wind power offshore is most cost-effective and reduces land requirements by 50% for a cost penalty of only 5%. Wind power can alternatively be replaced by photovoltaics, leading to a cost penalty of 10% for the same effect. My research shows that fully renewable electricity supply can be designed with very different physical appearances and impacts on landscapes and the population, but at similar cost.

Highlights

Europe has the potential to generate all its electricity from renewable sources [1,2,3]
Among almost all of the ~29 million observations, cost of electricity in all Europe is between 0.06 and 0.10 EUR per kWh consumed while land requirements of solar and wind power are between 0% and 3% of total European land (Fig 2)
The observations show that land requirements of European electricity systems can vary by more than an order of magnitude while their cost does not exceed twice the lowest cost

Summary

Introduction

Europe has the potential to generate all its electricity from renewable sources [1,2,3]. While renewable electricity is an indispensable option to mitigate global climate change, its high land requirements have the potential to cause conflicts locally where it is built. Of the main two current technologies of renewable electricity, photovoltaics and wind turbines, only the latter allows for limited dual use of land: for technical reasons, spacing between turbines is large and, as a result, that land can be used for agriculture [7].

Results

Discussion

Conclusion