Solar and wind farms occupy a sliver of rural land — an estimated 424,000 acres in 2020 — but the large majority of renewable energy projects installed in recent years are located on agricultural land. USDA researchers, who looked at land cover three years before and three years after construction of energy projects, found that cropland or pasture-rangeland usually stayed in the same land cover even after the addition of solar or wind development.
“Most agricultural lands surrounding solar farms and wind turbines remained in agriculture during the period studied, although land cover change was more common after solar farm development than after wind turbine development,” said three economists in USDA’s digital magazine Amber Waves. Land cover changed on one-fifth of solar sites and on 4 percent of wind turbine sites.
“The fact that a high share [about 85 percent] of crop and pasture-rangeland in proximity to solar farms remained in agricultural production may be somewhat unexpected because the land cover under and between solar panels was removed during the construction of a typical solar farm,” wrote economists Karen Maguire, Sophia Tanner, and Justin Winikoff. They noted concerns about land use competition between solar and crop farms. “For wind turbines, the persistence of agricultural land cover after development suggests that wind turbine development was compatible with agricultural production.”
Wind and solar accounted for 10.7 percent of U.S. electricity generation. Wind energy, expanding since the 1990s, was the leading contributor. Solar energy came later but was growing at a faster rate. Solar farms require about 10 times more land area per megawatt of power compared to wind farms.
“Differences in the location of solar and wind developments, as well as variations in the type and extent of land directly affected, are likely to result in differing impacts of solar and wind energy on agricultural land cover,” said the article.
From 2016-20, large-scale commercial solar capacity in rural areas more than doubled. Solar projects were most common in the West, mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. Wind turbines, “concentrated in ares with consistent, high wind speeds,” were most prominent in the Plains, followed by the Midwest and West, said the researchers.
Some 43 percent of solar projects installed in rural areas from 2012-20 were on cropland. “The Midwest had the highest share of solar installations on cropland [70 percent],” said Maguire, Tanner, and Winikoff. Installations in the Plains and the West were mostly on pasture and rangelands.
In a report earlier this year, the three USDA economists said a significant expansion of solar and wind energy, part of a drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “will have local landscape effects in rural areas. These projects also have local socioeconomic effects in rural communities, providing benefits such as leasing revenue and tax revenue but also imposing costs such as changes to the local landscape, farmland conversion following solar development, noise and altered views from wind turbines, environmental effects, and potential reductions in property values.”