A Wind Farm Requires 725 Times More Land Than A Fracking Site To Produce Same Amount Of Energy -- Carpe Diem

Yesterday I wrote:

I have talked about this progression in the past: the transmission / energy / electricity grid will gradually be improved because of the emphasis on wind and solar energy. Several generations from now, the solar and wind farms can be replaced by small nuclear electricity-generating sites, taking up a fraction (like 1%) of the land that is required by wind/solar.  By then, perhaps even the shale revolution will have run its course and close to 100% of electricity will be generated by nuclear energy. 

It turns out that there is a similar story, and a very interesting story, over at Carpe Diem on the same subject: the amount of land tied up / made unproductive by wind and solar farms. Carpe Diem is writing: Inconvenient fact: To produce the same energy, a windfarm requires 725X more land than a fracking site.

• For the “land area of the whole facility,” a wind farm requires 725 times more land than a fracking site to produce the same energy (9.5 TWh) — about 3,500 acres/5.6 square miles for a wind farm with 87 328-foot tall turbines vs. about 5 acres.
• A solar park requires 462 times more land area than a fracking site: about 2,290 acres or about 3.5 square miles.

But the real answer to US energy goes even farther: small nuclear power reactors. There is a long, long article summarizing progress to date over at the World Nuclear Organization blog:

A 2009 assessment by the IAEA under its Innovative Nuclear Power Reactors & Fuel Cycle (INPRO) program concluded that there could be 96 small modular reactors (SMRs) in operation around the world by 2030 in its 'high' case, and 43 units in the 'low' case, none of them in the USA. (In 2011 there were 125 small and medium units – up to 700 MWe – in operation and 17 under construction, in 28 countries, totaling 57 GWe capacity.)

In January 2012 the DOE called for applications from industry to support the development of one or two US light-water reactor designs, allocating $452 million over five years. Four applications were made, from Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox, Holtec, and NuScale Power, the units ranging from 225 down to 45 MWe.

DOE announced its decision in November 2012 to support the B&W 180 MWe mPower design, to be developed with Bechtel and TVA. Through the five-year cost-share agreement, the DOE will invest up to half of the total project cost, with the project's industry partners at least matching this. The total will be negotiated between DOE and B&W, up to $226 million. 

In March 2013 the DOE called for applications for second-round funding, and proposals were made by Westinghouse, Holtec, NuScale, General Atomics, and Hybrid Power Technologies, the last two being for EM2 and Hybrid SMR, not PWRs. Other (non-PWR) small reactor designs will have modest support through the Reactor Concepts RD&D program. A late application ‘from left field’ was from National Project Management Corporation (NPMC) which includes a cluster of regional partners in the state of New York, South Africa’s PBMR company, and National Grid, the UK-based grid operator with 3.3 million customers in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

By the way, another great article from Matt Ridley via Carpet Diem on the idiocy surrounding wind and solar power.  From Matt Ridley, from Great Britain:

Despite the best efforts of the Conservatives to rein in their Lib Dem colleagues, the renewable-energy bandwagon careens onward, costing ever more money and doing real environmental harm, while producing trivial quantities of energy and risking blackouts next winter. People keep telling me it’s no good being rude about all renewables: some must be better than others. Well, I’m still looking:

Tidal power remains a (literal) non-starter; if you ask ministers why nothing has been built, they say it’s not for want of proffering ludicrously generous subsidies on our behalf. Yet still no takers.

Wave power: again, the sky’s the limit for what the government will pay if you can figure out how to make dynamos and generators survive the buffeting of waves, corrosion of salt and encrustation of barnacles. Nothing doing.

Geothermal: perhaps great potential in the future for heating homes through district heating schemes, though expensive here compared with Iceland, but not much use for electricity. Air-source and ground-source heat pumps, all the rage a few years ago, have generally proved more costly and less effective than advertised, but they are getting better. Trivial contribution so far.

Solar power: one day soon it will make a big impact in sunny countries, and the price is falling fast, but generating for the grid in cloudy Britain where most power is needed on dark winter evenings will probably never make economic sense. Covering fields in Devon with solar panels today is just ecological and economic vandalism. Solar provides about a third of one per cent of world energy.

Offshore wind: Britain is the world leader, meaning we are the only ones foolish enough to pay the huge subsidies (treble the going rate for electricity) to lure foreign companies into tackling the challenge of erecting and maintaining 700-ft metal towers in stormy seas. The good news is that the budget for subsidising offshore wind has almost run out. The bad news is that it is already costing us billions a year and ruining coastal views.

And so it goes.  Algore is suing Aljazeera.