How much land for wind and solar?

Colorado energy official says giant expansion of wind and solar will still be dwarfed by exurban development

by Allen Best

To achieve its goals for reduction of greenhouse gases by 2040 and 2050, Colorado will need much more renewable electricity to meet growing demands from transportation and buildings. The Colorado Energy Office estimates that Colorado will need three times as much wind as it now has and five times as much solar.

Sounds staggering. Will Toor, the director of CEO, says it should not be seen as onerous.

New solar with capacity of 10,000 megawatts during the next 15 years will require between 75 and 125 square miles of land, he said in a session on July 9 organized by The Nature Conservancy.

“That sounds like a lot of land, but it’s about one-tenth of 1% of land in the state,” he said. He compared it to the 500,000 acres projected for low-density exurban sprawl that will use 500 times as much land.

“We’re talking about relatively small scale, but one that we need to get right.”

Local governments in Colorado have reacted to the new renewable energy projects in various ways. For example, Mesa County this past spring adopted regulations that no stakeholders seemed to like perfectly but with compromises that were acceptable to landowners and solar developers in Palisade and other communities.

Others have adopted regulations that would seem to enact onerous conditions. Lightly populated Washington County, on Colorado’s great plains, has such regulations.

Other counties have adopted moratoriums. And Norwood, located in western Colorado, has drawn statewide attention in the Denver Post and other publications for its skeptical view of new solar.

SB24-212, a bill introduced in the final days of the legislative session, originally was drafted to assert strong state authority into local land-use matters. It ran into stiff and predictable opposition from local governments, who tend to be starchily protective of their turf. But at least one industry group, Colorado Solar and Storage Association, which represents about 90% of solar companies in Colorado, offered only lukewarm support when the bill was finally introduced during the last two weeks of this year’s session.

State Sen. Chris Hansen, a prime sponsor of SB24-212, described a “very thoughtful and engaging process that lasted for several months” as the bill was drafted and revised. The process included the “opportunity to hear hundreds of points of views.”

The bill intends to offer best practices, making state experts available on call while preserving local control with the goal of avoiding roadblocks

This most certainly will not be the last conversation at the state capitol, said Hansen, but he hopes it will set Colorado up for success.

The law requires a study that will, according to Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont, define “what we are doing and what we might be able to do better.”

A central repository for knowledge about how to address renewable energy projects will be created. State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville, said even a municipality as large as Louisville doesn’t have the staffing expertise that will be provided as a result of the bill.

“I think it’s a great example of the way that local government and the state can collaborate on our shared goal of taking climate action,” he said.

Kelley Flenniken, the director of Colorado Counties, asked a question that caused Toor to acknowledge pushback from many counties. The counties said that they thought that what existed was already working well. So why fix what’s not broken?

Their question was legitimate, he replied, and it led to the distinction of “where is it working well and where is it not working well.”

Where exactly renewable generation gets located will, of course, depend upon transmission. Xcel Energy is well along the way on two segments of its 550-mile Colorado Power Pathway that sweeps around eastern Colorado. Two segments are well underway, and ground-breaking for a third of the five segments was held July 11 adjacent to the St. Vrain natural gas plant near Platteville. The 75-mile segment will link with a new substation near the Pawnee coal-fired plant near Brush.

Some counties have done almost nothing. Baca County, the state’s Colorado’s most southeasterly county, has the state’s best wind energy, according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and it also has very strong solar. Existing transmission has been maxed out. It needs new power lines

At least two ideas have surfaced, and there may be more. Xcel Energy had proposed a 60-mile?? extension from the Colorado Power Pathway called the May Valley-Longhorn extension. Another developer has the idea of creating a new transmission line that will export power from new wind and solar projects in Baca County in a southeasterly direction into Oklahoma and Arkansas.

County commissioners for the last year have been meeting with solar and wind developers, but it’s all in practice of theory without a transmission line. Baca County has no planning staff, though.

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