The latest from AOER’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, aka The Energy Bad Boys:
Utility scale solar is a land hog. Isaac and Mitch show that solar power’s land requirements are far more severe when taken through the lens of capacity value rather than simple energy production. This is important:
Most public discussions about solar focus on energy production, but power systems are built around reliability during peak demand. Once you look at the grid through the lens of accredited capacity—that is, capacity that can be relied upon during peak demand—instead of annual energy, the land requirements for different technologies look radically different.
This is the energy vs. capacity distinction that most solar land-use debates miss.
Using MISO’s new Direct Loss of Load (DLOL) accreditation methodology, the Boys demonstrate that solar’s capacity value will plummet from 30% in 2025-2026 to a mere 2.25% by 2030. At the same time, natural gas maintains an 82% capacity value.
This means that matching the accredited capacity of a single 500 MW natural gas plant on 58 acres would require over 105,000 acres of solar panels in 2030. That’s roughly 29% of all land in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. Meeting Iowa’s peak capacity needs with solar would gobble up 8% of the state’s total landmass, 2,207 times more land than an equivalent natural gas buildout.
There’s a real project—the River City Energy Project—that AOER analyzed. The proposed 500 MW solar facility from Ranger Power in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, would consume 2,894 acres of mostly farmland. At the request of Cerro Gordo County, we provided expert witness testimony in the utility docket. Cerro Gordo County is home to picturesque Clear Lake, in north central Iowa.
Our testimony highlighted how MISO’s shift from ELCC (Effective Load Carrying Capacity) to DLOL appropriately reduces solar’s value as a reliability resource. This change will have critical implications for utility planning and land use decisions across MISO’s territory. And we have the charts and data to prove it.
