Meeting the European Union’s goal of achieving net zero by 2050 will require the number of solar- and wind-power installations to increase threefold by 2030. Among the greatest challenges are the difficulty of finding suitable land for deployment and the barriers created by strict regulations on land use. Partner Raffael Winter and colleagues find that technical, regulatory, and environmental constraints reduce available land for wind projects in Germany by 82 percent, with almost 60 percent of the restrictions caused by regulatory rules about proximity to populated areas.
Image description:
Four maps show areas of Germany that are suitable for wind turbines, with available land shaded in blue. Map 1 shows 184,000 sq km of potentially available land. Moving from left to right, the 3 remaining maps show that more land is rendered unsuitable for wind turbines: map 2 shows 173,000 sq km of available land, with reductions in land resulting from technical constraints (–11,000 sq km); map 3 shows 53,000 sq km of available land, with reductions from regulatory constraints (–120,000 sq km); and map 4 shows 34,000 sq km of available land, with further reductions from environmental constraints (–19,000 sq km).
Footnote 1: Potentially available land after removing cities, closed forests or water bodies, military areas, or airports.
Footnote 2: Includes a 200m buffer around protected land in protection categories I–IV (strict nature reserve, wilderness area, national park, natural monument, or feature).
Footnote 3: Minimum proximity to settlements based on regulation at regional level.
Footnote 4: Includes protected land in categories V and VI (protected landscape/seascape, protected area with sustainable use of natural resources) or other.
Source: McKinsey land use optimization model Space Fit based on Copernicus Global Land Service, ESA CCI Land Cover, Global Solar Atlas, Global Wind Atlas, MERIT DEM, Open Street Map, and Protected Area and Key Biodiversity Area data of 2020 downloaded from the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) and provided by BirdLife International.
End of image description.
To read the article, see “Land: A crucial resource for the energy transition,” May 16, 2023.