Calculating Land Use in your Renewable Energy Projects

CNET's Green Tech reports on a report discussing land use required for renewable energy projects.

Figuring land use into renewable-energy equation

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Imagine if your country had an unlimited budget but a limited amount of land: what renewable energy has the most potential?

Rutgers University professor Clinton Andrews and colleagues ran the numbers on this thought experiment and came up with some surprises. They identified clear limits on some technologies, notably biofuels, but concluded that the bigger challenges to renewable energy and land relate to siting energy facilities, particularly transmission lines.

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Whenever some one says to put PV on a data centers roof you are lucky to get 10% of the power used generated by PV.