Biden’s ‘Green’ Transition Is Already Running Out Of Prime Real Estate For Solar And Wind Projects: REPORT
President Joe Biden’s goal to transition the U.S. to wind, solar and other green energy sources is facing difficulties due to a lack of available land, according to a Monday report from ICF Climate Center, the climate research arm of consulting firm ICF.
Wind and solar farms typically require 10 times as much land as comparable coal or gas-fired power plants — even counting the land used to produce and transport the relevant fossil fuels, according to The Washington Post. Green power projects are facing “increasingly high barriers” to development thanks to a lack of available land close enough with both sufficient grid access and capability, making it difficult for developers to leverage the massive subsidies offered by the president’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to the ICF Climate Center report.
In this paper, our experts help illuminate pathways for utilities that can achieve ambitious climate policy goals while taking into account the practical, regulatory & financial issues they face. https://t.co/G3UWdRWlw5 pic.twitter.com/2TrxDH3B8W
— ICF (@ICF) April 24, 2023
The issue of limited real estate is hindering green manufacturing “megasite” projects — typically defined as large factories greater than 1,000 acres — in part due to difficulty finding available sites with access to sufficient power. The president has set a goal for the U.S. economy to emit net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Biden’s EPA recently took sweeping measures to limit the emissions of mostly Midwestern coal plants, while the Interior Department has taken several steps to limit drilling for oil and natural gas on federal lands.
One key bottleneck is the time it takes for a project to be approved for connection to the grid — known as the interconnection queue — which can take years, the Post reported. At the end of 2021, roughly 8,100 projects, the majority of which were wind, solar and batteries, were awaiting approval.
Ultimately, less than one-fifth of all solar and wind projects survive the interconnection queue, with many cancelled due to the cost to upgrade local grids to interface with them, the Post reported. For a solar farm that would generate just 0.1 GW of power — less than 0.01% of the 1300 GW of clean energy projects in the interconnection queue — upgrade costs can range from $490,000 to $675,000, according to the ICF Climate Center.
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Everything the climate alarmists say is a lie and a horrible hoax. They want windmills and solar everywhere, knowing that they will be the real environmental disaster. Each wind turbine can require up to 5 acres and it takes 350 wind turbines to equal the electricity generated from one coal fired plant. So, imagine, it would take 1,750 acres of wind turbines to generate the same electricity as one traditional power plant. Offshore turbines can require up to 200 acres, and now we learn that the sonar mapping needed for offshore windmills is killing the whales like the land windmills are killing our endangered eagles. We can watch in real time Europe collapsing after decades of their “Green New Deal” policies made them totally dependent on Russian gas and oil. In some places, energy costs have increased 1000% and businesses are closing because they can’t afford their utility bills. They’re clear cutting their forests and desperately digging again for coal.
What’s even more insane is that Biden and the Democrats last year passed their 730 billion dollar Green Energy bill, laughably called the “Inflation Reduction Act”, to institute all these proven failed policies here. It’s nothing but a Green New Deal slush fund that includes such insanity as 60 billion dollars for “environmental justice”. And then there’s the four or five states that want to ban gas powered cars by 2030. Never mind that most of the rare earth minerals for car batteries are mined in China or in Africa by child slave labor. Or that the cobalt and lithium mines are a dangerous environmental hazard. And never mind that windmills and solar only have an effective shelf life of about twenty years and there is no environmentally safe way to dispose of them when they expire (how do you dispose of tens of thousands of 351 ft. indestructible and non-degradable windmill blades). Or that almost all of our solar panels come from China. Or that China is the worst polluting country in the world and is building a new coal fired plant (1140 so far) every week and laughing at our idiocy and how we will continue to make them rich.
Americans need to wake up before it’s too late and realize that the middle class will be bankrupted by our own government’s never ending money printing (which is the main cause of inflation) and the ever increasing taxes and higher and higher energy costs that will result from their idiotic “Green” policies and mandates.