Attended a virtual Stanford lecture a few days ago, + wanted to share the first of 2 fascinating slides. A number of commenters on posts I have published recently have been dismissive of wind + solar based chiefly on the land area needed for deployment. They argue that valuable agricultural land is sacrificed, denying the demonstrated utilitarian use of all the free space between the onshore turbines or utility-scale solar for row crops + livestock.
Allow me to get quantitative for a moment. Mark Jacobson's hypothetical projection for 2050 with full electrification includes almost all transportation. Coal is eliminated except for some metallurgical purposes, no longer for power. Petroleum + fossil methane + propane are limited to petrochemicals but no longer power. Nuclear is limited to research reactors, generation of medically useful isotopes + a dwindling number of legacy power reactors.
On the slide note that for the midcentury US, using only sustainable energy types [indicated by the blue arrows], onshore wind would take up on 0.24% of land area + utility-scale solar [ignoring rooftop solar which does not] + centralized solar power [of which I am not a fan] would use a further 0.87%.Â
Compare that to 2026, where already 1.24% of land area is committed just to corn-based biofuel [a huge boondoggle, wasting taxpayer money] + 1.16% of land for the various fossil fuel industries, with all their pollution + despoliation [indicated by the red arrows]. The comparison then is simple addition.
Total US land area in 2050 committed to just wind + solar would be only 1.11%. Compare that to US land area even now in 2026 committed to fossil fuels + corn-based ethanol 2.4%, more than twice as much. As a final point, so far as SMRs go, we won't realistically see any contribution until the 2030s, if then.
I'm anticipating a few comments on this post of course. My central point here is that folks who may be ambivalent about climate science should stop using the argument that wind + solar use too much space. My second point is that for the others who will argue that I'm hopelessly utopian in promoting this vision, I argue that the true utopians are those who think we can burn fossil fuels + build nuclear power plants forever. What cannot continue forever will stop. Full stop.
Tomorrow I will post the other slide, demonstrating that deploying solar + wind + storage correlates globally with lower electricity prices. More good fun.
