News Release:By the third quarter of 2012, the United States had deployed more than 2.1 gigawatts of utility-scale solar generation capacity, with 4.6 gigawatts under construction as of August 2012.
Continued growth is anticipated owing to state renewable portfolio standards and decreasing system costs. One concern regarding large-scale deployment of solar energy is its potentially significant land use. Efforts have been made to understand solar land use estimates by many researches but haven't been able to find a comprehensive evaluation of solar land use requirements. In this report, NREL scientists provide data and analysis of the land use associated with U.S. utility-scale ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) facilities.
"The numbers aren't good news or bad news, it’s just that there was not an understanding of actual land-use requirements before this work. However, we were happy to find out that many of the solar land use ranges and estimates used in the literature are very close to actual solar land use requirements that we found." Said Paul Denholm, one of the report editors at NREL (reference).
Access the report HERE
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