Renewable Energy’s Land Use Reckoning

Decarbonizing the electric grid will require a dramatic expansion of renewable energy by mid-century, and significantly more land dedicated to clean power. But where and how that buildout occurs will shape whether the environmental benefits of renewables are fully realized or come at a high cost to ecosystems, farmland, and communities.

Grace Wu of the Spatial Climate Solutions Lab at UC Santa Barbara and Jonathan Thompson, research director at Harvard Forest, examine the tension between rapid renewable energy expansion and conscientious land use. Wu, who has co-authored recent reports on the environmental impacts of clean energy siting policies, explores strategies for minimizing impacts while ensuring energy remains reliable and affordable. Thompson, whose research quantifies the effects of land use on forest ecosystems, discusses the push-and-pull dynamic unfolding in Massachusetts, where solar development has resulted in real losses of forests and farmland, and where new siting models are emerging.

The two also explore how incentives and regulations influence land use decisions, and how policy can reduce land impacts while supporting clean power development.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. On today’s podcast, we’ll take a look at the growing tension between the need to quickly ramp up renewable energy, and the need to do so without sacrificing the very landscapes that we’re trying to protect by shifting to clean power. Nationally, we’ll need to dramatically expand renewable generation by mid century to meet climate goals, in the process, dedicating much more land to clean energy production

Where and how we build new clean energy resources matters deeply for ecosystems, farms, and the communities that depend on them. Bigger picture, where and how clean energy is sited directly influences the degree to which its climate benefits can be realized. On the podcast, we’re joined by two experts in land use whose work seeks to address these tensions. Grace Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has been an author on a series of recent reports on the impact of clean energy siting policies on the environment, and on strategies to minimize those impacts, while ensuring reliable and affordable clean energy.

Jonathan Thompson is Senior Ecologist and Research Director at Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a state where the push for solar power has meant real losses of forests and farmlands, and where the state is trying to rethink how and where clean energy gets built. Jonathan’s work focuses on quantifying the impacts of land use on forest ecosystems and on policy remedies. The two will talk about the role of incentives and regulation in land use decision making and how state and federal policies can lead to win-win outcomes. Grace and Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathan Thompson: Thanks for having me.

Grace Wu: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Stone: So let’s start out for a moment just getting familiar with the work that each of you does. Grace, you’re at UC Santa Barbara. Tell us about your research.

Wu: My work, broadly, is centered on climate action on land. Within that, I have two thrusts, the first of which is siting renewables and transmission infrastructure in ways that minimize impact to natural habitat. And the second is focused on how that infrastructure interacts with other forms of climate solutions such as reforestation. So a lot of that requires spatial planning and land use planning.

Stone: And Jonathan, you’re at Harvard Forest. What is the role of the forest and what does your work with it involve?

Thompson: The Harvard Forest is a department within Harvard University, but separated by about 70 miles, where we have about 4,000 acres that we consider ourselves to be Harvard’s outdoor laboratory and classroom. Within the portfolio of research we do here, I am a landscape ecologist, and think about how land use and land protection impacts both ecosystems and communities, and work at this interface of human and natural systems.

Stone: So let’s go into the conversation here. So Grace, starting at the national level, the US needs to dramatically expand its renewable energy capacity to meet climate change or to address climate change. How much land is actually going to be needed to site this much new clean power, and what’s at stake from a land and climate perspective if we don’t plan carefully?

Wu: The net zero studies that I’ve seen for the US have put that capacity expansion requirement at something like six to seven times the current capacity, and this is particularly for wind and solar, which make up the largest share of generation by mid century. And in terms of land use, in total, in our studies, we find that up to 300,000 square miles, which is almost 200 million acres of land, would be required for a combination onshore wind, solar, PV, transmission, and bioenergy, and this is to meet net zero targets by 2050.

We can reduce some of that land use, getting us to something closer to 200,000 square miles, or 130 million acres. For those of you who don’t know where to place those number of acres, to put that in perspective, that’s essentially the land area equivalent of California for wind farms alone, which includes spacing requirements and the land area equivalent of Illinois in solar farms, and finally, the land area equivalent of Maryland in new transmission corridors. So that’s an enormous amount of land. And what’s at stake in our intact landscapes, wildlife corridors, threatened, endangered species habitat, we found those three categories are most at risk of land use conversion by these three technologies. And in terms of the social aspects, we also find that thousands of square miles of highly productive or prime farmland may be at risk.

Stone: So you’ve been an author on a series of reports that has been funded by the Nature Conservancy, and those are the “Power of Place” reports, that’s the title of the reports. And the reports conclude that it is possible to meet climate goals with renewable energy while protecting natural and working lands. And you just mentioned that it sounded like about a third of the projected land use could be kind of rolled back with the correct land use planning in place. And the report does refer to a number of land saving strategies, such as agrovoltaics, colocation, the use of fixed tilt photovoltaics. Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities that these strategies present?

Wu: We found across multiple of the “Power Play” studies that consistently, regardless of where you are in the US, prime farmland and farmland in general is a highly desirable type of land use for solar development, being flat, sunny, close to road infrastructure, close to transmission, and in some cases, substations. So those make it very desirable from a developer’s perspective. And then in terms of other elements we were trying to address in our study were possible community opposition. So trying to ensure equitable distribution of benefits to increase the public acceptance of these types of large infrastructure projects. And then what I alluded to are what I — in terms of environmental impact, we have typically referred to as Greenfield solar projects that occur forest, desert, shrub land, in some cases, even tall grass, prairie.

Stone: Areas that have not been developed previously essentially?

Wu: Exactly, yeah. Greenfield projects that, from our perspective, we would like to avoid. But the conflict here is we want to avoid greenfield projects, hence pushing a lot of that solar development on farmland. And so this environmental pressure and social opposition is really coming to a head and creating real land squeeze or conflict, and this is in addition to other pressure that’s being put on the land for other climate solutions as well as adaptation. So this really compelled us in our last study to think creatively and kind of outside the box about other ways to represent and explore strategies to address some of these, and actually to leverage some of the synergies that come with these technologies.

So in the last study, we examine, as you said, three such land sparing strategies, agrovoltaics, colocation, and fixed tilt photovoltaics, all of which use land more efficiently. Agrovoltaics is the integration of solar panels into farmland in a way that does not displace food production. In our study, we were focused on crop based systems, though agrivoltaics broadly encompasses rangeland, so grazing lands, as well as crop lands.

Stone: Can you explain what agrovoltaics are a little bit for people who aren’t familiar?

Wu: In the context of our study, we were really focused on the type of agrivoltaics that allows panels to be put above crops, in some cases, row crops, and we did an extensive review of studies that reported shade tolerance of particular types of crops in response to either shade cloth or actual panels placed above them. So we find that several crops are actually very amenable to the type of shading that solar panels can provide, and not just amenable, but actually like provide enhanced benefits, enhanced yields, or enhanced quality.

So this is a type of synergy we were trying to exploit in the model by representing these types of systems that’s typically, you know, very macro, very large scale course. And so we characterized where these agrivoltaic systems could ideally be located in the US, we examined and reflected the cost increases of doing something like this, and we also represented the slight benefits for solar generation because of situating solar panels in a cooler environment, which actually increases the benefits for the electricity that can be generated per panel.

Stone: And the landowner would still earn from the crops as well as from the electricity production?

Wu: Yeah, so that’s one of the benefits, is that they can extract doubly from the land. And that also prevents this potential indirect land use change from displacing farmland with solar panels, is that farmland may cause cropland expansion elsewhere, potentially in natural habitat. So I think agrivoltaics addresses that potential harm from indirect land use change. And what the other two technologies, colocation, we define as the sharing of the same site by both wind and solar, PV, has tremendous benefits that are very under explored in the US, includes sharing road, infrastructure, substation transmission lines.

The complementarity of the two types of technologies, meaning when wind blows is actually when solar is not available in many places of the US. So at night, the wind speeds typically pick up, and then during the day they die down, which is when solar comes online. And so we can actually utilize transmission lines much better. We don’t have to have large corridors. It’s a cost saving strategy. Studies have shown that there’s very little shading impacts from the turbines onto the panels themselves.

And finally, we looked at fixed tilt PV, which is a type of technology that sounds like exactly what the term is, is it’s panels that don’t move, they’re stagnant. Compared to the currently prevailing technology, which is a single access tracking system which tracks east west as the sun moves along the horizon, it’s actually about 30 percent less denser, so it saves 30 percent land, but it has lower capacity factors, meaning it’s just less efficient at generating electricity.

Stone: You’re talking about the fixed tilt, or the tracking?

Wu: This is the fixed tilt. So it’s more land use efficient, so it uses 30 percent less land compared to single access tracking. It has lower capacity factor, so it just generates less electricity per hour in certain cases. But where it currently is the dominant technology, which is in the northeast, at higher latitudes, tracking systems which are more expensive don’t actually add a lot more value due to these higher latitudes having just less direct sunlight, like direct radiation. And these fixed tilt panels are actually good and cheaper at harnessing that diffuse radiation. And so we wanted to capture this dynamic and calculate the cost as well as the land use savings from a fixed tilt versus a tracking system.

Stone: You have cofounded something that’s called the Multi Criteria Analysis for Planning Renewable Energy Initiative. Its goal is to identify the best renewable energy development areas. And you just kind of mentioned, you know, putting things on colocation, et cetera. But what else are you focusing on in terms of, through that initiative, to really maximize both the energy potential of clean resources as well as minimize the land impacts?

Wu: In that initiative, we were trying to provide the spatial and land use planning tools to avoid development in the most, highest impact, and highest conservation value locations. And we wanted to do that at the same time as providing opportunities to site where the solutions are win-win. Close to transmission, close to load centers, which are places that would use much of that Electricity. The goal is to do this in a less piecemeal way, as opposed to looking at the landscape level, to encourage zoning so that we’re not experiencing what some have termed energy sprawl.

Stone: This has spatial planning tools, is one of the results. Who are those available to?

Wu: They’re publicly available to anyone who has the capability and desire to use geospatial tools. We have worked with World Bank, the Electricity Sector Management Assistance Program, ESMAP, to make a web version of that tool called REZoning. And the users of that are typically government employees, funders who are interested in finding bankable projects. And so we’re hoping that this enables a wider swath of the population to be able to access spatial planning tools.

Stone: Let me ask you one more question here on this point. So your work focuses primarily on the west, not completely, but primarily on the west, as I understand. And in the west of this country, there are a lot of public lands, and that makes it very different from the east. How much of the development in the west is actually on these public lands and on private lands? Just to get that perspective.

Wu: So most development of wind and solar have historically been on private land due to the ease of accessing that private land, the permitting hurdles, the cost. It’s a confluence of multiple factors that have led to this outcome, even though there are multiple opportunities to site on public lands in the western US. And so the opportunities to do that are within the hands of the Bureau of Land Management, or the BLM. And so I think that the emphasis has really been to encourage more public land development in a sensitive way, because a lot of that land is managed predominantly for biodiversity and to maintain intact habitat.

But the incentives in the past have not yet been aligned to properly encourage enough developer interest, and that’s what I — from my understanding, primarily due to the cost differences of signing on public land and the time it takes to receive a permit. The BLM has has attempted to address some of those issues, in addition to the concerns about siting on the most sensitive parts of the public lands through the Western Solar Plan, which was released last year, and they have designated kind of like the preferred sites for development, and I think are in the process of developing incentives, proper incentives, cost transmission access to enable development in those areas.

Stone: Jonathan, I want to shift to you. We’ve been talking about a more national perspective. I want to talk specifically about Massachusetts, which is a state that has made real progress on solar, but that progress has come at a cost. Since 2010, the state has lost thousands of acres of forest and farmland due to solar power development. Can you introduce the major land use tensions that have emerged in Massachusetts?

 

Thompson: Because Massachusetts has a legislatively mandated net zero goal for 2050, there is a lot of push to electrify the economy through green energy. And so there’s been a big build out of solar. And so we’ve lost more than 13,000 acres in the past decade or so, and most of that has gone into and replaced forest land. Massachusetts is about 60 precent forested, and about 60 percent of the new ground mount solar has gone on former forest land. And you’re right, that’s resulted in a lot of land use tensions. I bet, on my drive to work this morning, which is a 20 minute drive, I probably saw 20 different yard signs that either said, “Forest and solar, we need both,” or, “Say no to the Shootsbury Solar Project.” And so it’s really animated.

Stone: So it really is an issue that everybody’s aware of and talking about it sounds like?

Thompson: It really is, and it’s a shame, because it’s divided the environmental community, and between those who are primarily interested in land conservation versus those who are primarily interested in mitigating climate change. And as you noted in your setup, that there needs to be ways to do both. And so I think that was the greatest outcome of this report that I wrote in partnership with Massachusetts Audubon, which was to show that this is a false choice, that there are opportunities to meet the state’s solar goals, 27 gigawatts is what they estimate they need by 2050, while retaining the forest that they need for both climate purposes and biodiversity and all the other great things that forests provide.

We tried to map, quite explicitly, all the places that solar could go that wouldn’t sacrifice the most valuable lands. More recently, the tension has expanded to some of the storage technologies. The small communities are understandably worried about big lithium ion batteries on top of their aquifers and what to do with a volunteer fire department and these facilities. So that’s sort of been the latest front in these tensions, though, that affects a much smaller amount of land. I’m excited to say that we seem to be moving past this either or, and at least the government is trying to work towards the both and perspective for forests and solar.

Stone: Well, as I understand the issue also, as you’ve just started to talk about, is ground mount solar development in Massachusetts. But the alternative to that, or one of the alternatives, would be to have all that solar mounted on rooftops.

Thompson: Yeah, rooftops to start with. Also, we examined the potential for canopy solar, which is more expensive, yes, but comes with other benefits as well, as people can park their cars in the shade and outside of the weather. And so in many larger venues, like the University of Massachusetts has the largest parking lot canopy solar installation in the state. There’s a lot of opportunities to use the developed landscape to meet both ground mount and elevated solar.

Massachusetts leads the country, for example, in landfill solar, where almost all of our landfills, capped landfills that is, have been covered with ground mount solar. And we mapped all the areas that could meet the ground mount solar for now. That remains much cheaper than the rooftop approach, largely for the economies of scale and the reduction in the soft costs associated with building out new solar. There is a lot of land. Until recently, it was land price and proximity to an interconnection that best predicted where solar would be built, and there doesn’t seem to have been any consideration of the environmental costs. Fortunately, that’s changing.

Stone: So as you mentioned, and if I understand this correctly, one of the barriers to the canopy and the rooftop solar is that it does have higher costs. The Harvard Forest Audubon report that you already mentioned notes that 30 percent reduction in those costs would double the development of rooftop and canopy solar. What would need to be done to achieve that 30 percent reduction in costs?

Thompson: It really is the soft cost. And what we mean by that are things like permitting and marketing and the individual outreach to individual landowners and homeowners who are building small solar projects, and all of that adds up to more than half of the cost of each project. Contrast that with Australia, for example, where the average cost per watt of solar is less than a dollar, and in Massachusetts, it’s estimated to be $2.70 per watt.

And so a few things could be done. Massachusetts, like several of the Eastern, particularly New England states, or what are called Home Rule states, where each municipality develops their own land use regulations, and that means that every permit and every installer needs to work separately with every municipality who have different rules, and there’s just a lot of inefficiencies. Massachusetts has 351 communities. That means 351 separate sets of land use rules around solar.

Simply creating state level, universal regulations would go a long way in increasing the efficiencies there. Other soft costs is, Massachusetts currently requires licensed electricians to install every part of the panel, and there have been arguments that this is work that could be done by lower paid technicians and then inspected by licensed electricians. I heard anecdotally that the average age of a licensed electrician is above 60, and that maybe those folks don’t like climbing up on roofs as much as younger technicians. And so there may be some potential for efficiencies there. But right now, it’s just very expensive to build small scale solar when you compare it to large ground mount systems.

Stone: Yeah, I want to ask you, you just mentioned the Massachusetts incentives, and you mentioned landfill solar being pretty well developed in the state. What about the federal incentives? For example, the IRA which is, obviously there’s some uncertainty about IRA incentives going forward under the current federal administration. But what extent do, I guess in the past, the state, as well as the current federal incentives, drive, inadvertently or not, the development of solar in places that might undermine conservation goals?

Thompson: Yeah, particularly in the SMART regs, which are the Massachusetts regulations, in the past, particularly in the early oughts, the incentives were really just to be closer to the interconnects. And as a result, you know, 10 percent of all the solar built in 2000 to 2020 were built in areas the state had mapped in their BioMap project as the most biodiverse in the state. And so there was really no incentives to go anywhere except where it was cheap.

Slowly, these changed, until the Healey administration, our now governor, and she has really, in the past year, transformed the incentives in SMART to include a mitigation fee, for example, at least this is pending legislation right now, where, to be eligible for the SMART payments, every acre built in solar would start with a $50,000 mitigation fee, and then the site would be examined. And if it was not in a high forest carbon area, that mitigation fee would be reduced. If it was not in an area mapped as critical for biodiversity, it would be reduced further. Not in an area for agriculture or connectivity, reduced again and again, until, if you built in a developed site, you’d have a zero dollar mitigation fee. Also important is that that money raised through those mitigation fees would go to land conservation to protect sites from development elsewhere. So we see this as a real win and a real pivot from where things were earlier in the century.

Stone: As you mentioned a few moments ago, Massachusetts has aggressive decarbonization goals, and I believe that the state had planned on developing offshore wind to help it meet some of those goals. Obviously, at least in the current moment, new offshore wind projects are obviously on hold. That would seem to imply that more of the pressure for decarbonization of the electricity system will fall on solar going forward. Can solar meet the demands, pick up the slack for clean energy in Massachusetts?

Thompson: Yes, it can. In my opinion, it’s unfortunate that we can’t do this with a better mix of renewables. But what we’ve shown is that, even without sacrificing our natural and working lands, there is plenty of capacity land area that can sustain solar and meet the demand. I think the real challenge for the state will be building out the new interconnects and the new grid infrastructure in ways that promote the building of new solar where the electricity is most needed, which is the more populated areas, and in areas that have been previously developed and could accommodate the solar without sacrificing the state’s forest, primarily, and the wetlands as well.

Stone: So Jonathan, the report that you mentioned from Harvard Forest and Massachusetts Audubon modeled different pathways for solar energy development going forward. I wonder what the key findings of that report were when you considered, for example, the status quo siting that the report gives us one example of the future, as well as more protective scenarios that it proposes?

Thompson: We examined three different scenarios, just like you say. One was the current siting scenario, and that was just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, and if the site is technically and legally viable, then it would be available within the economic model to potentially develop solar. And then we increasingly added protective screens. So we said, for example, in the mid-impact scenario, “We will not allow any new solar on areas mapped as prime farmland, areas mapped as essential for biodiversity and wildlife habitat, the sites with the highest forest carbon,” and here we we took the 75 percent of forest with the highest carbon density in them, and screened those out of availability. And areas that the Nature Conservancy has mapped as most valuable for climate resilience.

So just focusing on those two scenarios, this changed the state from having 1.2 million suitable acres that were technically feasible to build solar on, and then with those environmental screens, down to about 100,000 acres. So a pretty big reduction as far as where we’d put them. Nonetheless, we showed that there was still ample area available to meet the 27 gigawatt goals. It came at a slightly higher cost, but not as much as I think you might expect. One of the big transitions was in the size of individual projects. We made available areas that were greater than two hectares, five acres or so, and that were previously developed, and in the modeling that we did with Evolved Energy, which picked among the sites to decide which of them were economically viable, they were able to fill in the — you know, many of the suburban areas and other areas that have open cleared areas.

This felt a little provocative at the time. Folks sort of pushed back on us and said, “Wow, I can’t imagine people putting a solar array in their back field.” To my thinking, though, is I can’t imagine putting a solar array over a 200 year old forest. To me, that’s more audacious than getting someone’s back lawn. But if you’re able to fill the areas and the road medians and all the landfills and the other open areas, you can easily meet the solar targets and produce that energy.

Stone: Well, it’s interesting, the low impact scenarios also showed lower costs overall when you factored in the natural and farmland losses that would go with the other scenarios, is that right?

Thompson: It does, and the reason I didn’t mention that out of the gates is that we had to make a series of assumptions about how we credit things like forest carbon. So one thing, when people compare the greenhouse gas profiles of solar to forest, they’ll often say, and not wrongly, that the amount of fossil fuels that we can offset by building solar represent a lot more carbon than trees can sequester. And that’s true, but what that forgets is, one, it’s not just what the trees are sequestering, but it is all the carbon that has been sequestered and accumulated in those forests over time, and also that these are different steps in the carbon cycle.

So while solar doesn’t sequester any carbon at all, and we need to not only stop putting carbon into the atmosphere, but we need to find ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And at least for now, trees, and photosynthesis more generally, are the best technology we have to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. So if you start valuing that ecosystem service of forest, and you value it at something like 150 to 200 dollars a ton, which is about what the social cost of carbon is, then it is a great savings to maintain all your forests and put solar in the developed spaces around them.

Stone: Well, as the report very explicitly states, forests currently remove about 10 percent of Massachusetts’s annual GHG emissions. So it’s very significant.

Thompson: Yes, exactly.

Stone: So Grace, turning back to you here, an interesting development in the west relates to what’s known as the Bureau of Land Management’s Western Solar Plan, which I believe was updated or amended just this past December, and it sets some guidelines as well, I believe, for federal lands for the development of clean energy. Can you tell us a little bit about that plan, its importance, again, particularly out in the west?

Wu: The Western Solar Plan is the latest effort from the Bureau of Land Management to direct, primarily solar, in the past that has also focused on wind, but this plan is focused on large scale solar development, in places that would be the least impactful for biodiversity and other resource management and resource needs. And also it’s to enable development on, previously, lands that have more or less been very difficult or off limits for siting. So the plan makes about 30 million acres of public lands in the 11 public states available for applications. So not necessarily pre-approved for development, but they’ve pre-designated them as being acceptable and welcome sites for solar developers, and they are predominantly for large scale projects that are grid connected.

And so these projects are meant to avoid and minimize any kind of adverse impact. So I think it’s definitely in the direction that I was mentioning, which is like zoning of areas, as opposed to allowing like a free for all, piecemeal, we’re going to put up lines wherever a project so happens to come up. So coordinated planning, I think, is really important for achieving low impact development at scale. And so I definitely think this is a really amazing step in the right direction, and I hope it leads to more lower impact projects. There are, of course, controversies as to why we need 30 million acres of public lands. That seems like a very large quantity compared to the oil and gas leases that have occurred on public lands. This is, you know, a fraction, a small fraction of that.

Stone: So I have a question for the two of you, and that relates to the vulnerability of clean energy development to the current uncertainty in federal incentives, particularly the IRA for clean energy development. Grace, starting with you, again, how vulnerable is development in the western part of this country to that uncertainty?

Wu: The studies have shown that IRA has probably doubled the rate of solar and wind development since 2022. And in terms of the fate of tax credits enabled through the IRA during the second Trump administration, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. We’ll probably see whatever does happen by the end of this year. The silver lining is that 80 percent, approximately, of all IRA dollars have flowed to Republican districts. And I think that tax credits as a component of that may actually have a lot more staying power than some of the more vulnerable EV related incentives for that reason.

And I would say that, because investment tax credits and production tax credits have been one of the major sources of incentivizing development in these Republican districts, they’re less likely to be on the chopping board. The possible outcomes from what I’ve seen are that the ITCs, the Investment Tax Credits and Production Tax Credits, may experience an earlier phase out compared to the previously designated 2034 deadline. There might be a domestic content requirement for projects that are funded that received such a tax credit. And I think the worst case scenario is that there is an all out repeal of the IRA by the end of this year, which I think seems unlikely.

Stone: Jonathan, in Massachusetts, you described earlier a very robust state incentive program for clean energy based on the state’s mid century net zero goals. How important is the IRA in that state?

Thompson: It is very important. The same tax credits that grace was speaking about would be, you know, I hesitate to say exactly how much, but they are much larger than the state incentives, such that, you know, we needed to revise the state incentives to make them big enough to to have the persuasion power to move these things around on the landscape. If the worst were to happen and IRA were to be repealed, then we would have just these state credits, and then presumably, these mitigation fees and things I was discussing earlier would be all the more incentivizing.

Stone: Got a final question for the two of you, and I’ll direct this one to Grace first. If you could change just one policy governing renewable energy development at the state or federal level to make, again, this development smarter and more sustainable, what would that be?

Wu: The single policy question is tough, mostly because I think it’s going to require a suite or an arsenal of changes, both at the state and policy level. But if I were to choose one, based on my work, and speaking with developers, landowners, I think that the industry, land use would all benefit from a higher incentive, something like a feed-in tariff for lower impact projects to really get projects like agrivoltaics or ecovoltaics, which is solar projects that have regenerative or habitat can actually restore habitat.

Those types of projects need to somehow have an economic incentive to be built. Right now, developers are really going for the bottom line and are looking for cookie cutter, large scale projects. And unless we place some kind of value and signal for them that these other projects that have co-benefits, that minimize direct and indirect land use change, it’s probably not going to happen at a fast enough speed to encompass a larger portion of development in the future.

Stone: And Jonathan, what about you? If there could be one policy change, what would it be?

Thompson: Again, I couldn’t point you to the specific policy, but it would relate to the siting of interconnects. Right now, it costs about a million dollars a mile for a project to plug in to the grid. So they tend to locate themselves as close to that interconnect as is possible. And right now, there are long queues at all the existing interconnects in the region that have really slowed down the pace of new renewable energy development. And so putting new interconnects online is vital to increasing the capacity, and where those interconnects land is really going to determine what land is then built out into solar around it.

Stone: Grace and Jonathan, thank you both for talking.

Thompson: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Wu: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Stoe: Today’s guests have been Grace Wu, an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Jonathan Thompson, Research Director at Harvard Forest. Visit the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy website for more podcasts as well as the latest energy policy research, blogs, and events from the center. You can keep up with all that’s happening by signing up for our monthly newsletter on our homepage. Our web address is KleinmanEnergy.upenn.edu. Thanks for listening to Energy Policy Now, and have a great day.