The federal tax credits for new wind and solar projects die tomorrow - the one-year deadline written into last summer's budget law - and the Energy Secretary marked the occasion with a statistic. "Wind and solar take a lot of land, 100 times more land for a similar amount of energy," Chris Wright said in the department's statement, adding that they "drive up the system costs and increase Americans' electricity prices." [1]
The land number has a checkable answer, and it is not close.
What the measurements say
Land-intensity data tracks how many hectares each energy source occupies per terawatt-hour of yearly output. Ground-mounted solar runs about 2,000; natural gas, counting wells, pipelines, and plants, runs 410 to 1,900. That makes solar roughly one to five times gas - not one hundred. [2]
Wind is the claim's bigger problem. A wind project's actual footprint - turbine pads, access roads, substations - runs about 130 hectares per terawatt-hour a year, which is less land than gas. The big numbers only appear if you charge wind for every acre between turbines, and even then the multiple tops out around 29 - while 97 to 99 percent of that "used" land keeps right on being farmed and grazed. [2][3] The corn does not stop growing because a turbine stands at the field's edge; that is why analysts count wind by project area in the first place. [3]
Data
| Wind, turbine footprint | 130 |
|---|---|
| Natural gas | 1,155 |
| Solar, ground-mounted | 2,000 |
| Wind, counting all spacing | 12,000 |
The price half of the claim
The statement's other assertion - that wind and solar "increase Americans' electricity prices" - inverts the cost rankings the industry publishes. New solar generation comes in about 41 percent cheaper, and onshore wind about 53 percent cheaper, than the lowest-cost fossil alternative, per the international renewable-energy agency's cost data. [4] Wright has been fact-checked on a version of this before; a related April claim earned a Half True. [4] Intermittency is a real engineering cost - grids pay for backup and storage - and an honest argument about those system costs exists. "100 times more land" is not that argument.
Why the timing matters
The subsidies Wright is celebrating the end of expire July 4, in the middle of a heat dome that has the country's largest grid running at record demand and burning through every megawatt it can find. [1] Whatever one thinks of the credits, the case for killing them was just made to the public with a land figure off by more than an order of magnitude and a price claim the cost data contradicts. The energy debate deserves real numbers; these were not them. [2][4]
