The Trump administration has a new beef with renewable energy: It takes up too much space. One of the Interior Department’s latest rules for evaluating whether to approve energy projects on federal land will focus on “energy density,” a metric that supposedly captures how much power a project can produce per acre of land it occupies. Secretary Doug Burgum, in describing his agency’s attitude toward renewables, has complained they are “gargantuan;” an agency spokesperson told The New York Times that “evaluating land use efficiency and environmental impact isn’t partisan, it’s responsible governance.”
It strikes me as a strange complaint. Clearly, a wind or solar farm could indeed be larger, per megawatt, than a typical coal or gas-fired power plant. But it’s not clear that the US is running out of acres for power projects, all else being equal. And if it is, looking at just the footprint of the power station is myopic: Renewables currently occupy no more than 2 million acres of federal land. Onshore oil and gas drilling leases occupy 24 million acres; coal mining occupies a further 405,000. Fossil fuels also need a lot of big pipelines, trains, roads, and ports to move them around. Not all acres are equal, of course, but there are myriad existing laws to protect areas that are sensitive for ecological, cultural, or other good reasons. And it’s not clear why size, per se, should be a decisive factor: Proximity to natural resources and to demand centers, access to transmission networks, cost, and speed to construction, not to mention climate impact, seem like much more important considerations for what kind of power station to build in a given place.
A broader issue with Interior’s crackdown on renewables is that it exacerbates what has always been the most widely held bipartisan complaint about US energy project development: There’s too much red tape. Now, there’s more than ever. It also, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) noted recently, smacks of “picking winners and losers,” which was supposed to be Democrats’ recurring transgression. Time will tell if other actions by the Trump administration can succeed in speeding up the construction of power capacity, regardless of flavor; for now, the main effect seems to be slowing it down.
