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Impact of siting ordinances on land availability for wind and solar development

Nature Energy volume 8, pages 1034–1043 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

In the United States, many siting regulations for wind and solar developments are created at the county or township level. Here we survey local zoning ordinances across the contiguous United States to understand the types and frequency of ordinances that might impact wind and solar development. We identify over 1,800 ordinances for wind and more than 800 ordinances for solar in 2022. To understand the impact of ordinances on anticipated land availability, we use spatial modelling on the setbacks specified in the ordinances. Extrapolating the setbacks throughout the country can reduce wind and solar resources by up to 87% and 38%, respectively, depending on the size of the setbacks applied. These results indicate the importance of capturing setback ordinances in resources assessments so as to not overstate resource potential, especially when considering highly decarbonized futures.

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Fig. 1: Summary of ordinances collected.
Fig. 2: Example of setbacks for two counties.
Fig. 3: Overview of the method used to determine resource availability after applying ordinance setbacks.
Fig. 4: National wind and PV capacity by scenario.
Fig. 5: State level wind and PV capacity by scenario.
Fig. 6: National wind and PV mean capacity factor and land area by scenario.
Fig. 7: National wind and PV capacity and land area by distance to transmission.

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Data availability

The wind siting ordinance data that support findings of this study are openly available in the Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI) at https://doi.org/10.25984/1873866. Solar ordinances are also available in OEDI at https://doi.org/10.25984/1873867.

Code availability

Model code used for this submission is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7301491 and https://zenodo.org/record/7473407.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank P. Gilman, Z. Eldridge and J. Botero of the Department of Energy for their thoughtful review and guidance. The authors also thank B. Roberts for developing the maps and D. Heimiller, M. Ruth and D. Bilello of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for their review and guidance. This work was authored by researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC36-08GO28308. Funding was provided by US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (award number 38421) and Wind Energy Technology Office. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the US Department of Energy or the United States Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA

    Anthony Lopez, Wesley Cole, Brian Sergi, Aaron Levine, Jesse Carey, Cailee Mangan, Trieu Mai, Travis Williams, Pavlo Pinchuk & Jianyu Gu

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Contributions

A. Lopez, W.C. and T.M. conceptualized the study and wrote the article. A. Lopez, P.P., B.S., T.W. and J.G. developed and applied the methods. A. Levine, J.C. and C.M. collected the data. A. Lopez, W.C. and T.M. acquired funding for the study.

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Correspondence to Anthony Lopez.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Energy thanks Yekang Ko, Roberta Nilson and Justin B. Winikoff for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–3, Figs. 1–16, Note 1 and references.

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Lopez, A., Cole, W., Sergi, B. et al. Impact of siting ordinances on land availability for wind and solar development. Nat Energy 8, 1034–1043 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-023-01319-3

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