Land-use impacts of Brazilian wind power expansion

Abstract

While wind power is a low-carbon renewable energy technology with relatively little land footprint, the necessary infrastructure expansion still has land-related environmental impacts. Brazil has seen more than a ten-fold increase in wind power capacity in the last decade. However, little is known about these impacts of wind power generation in Brazil compared to other world regions, although Brazilian wind power infrastructure is concentrated in the least protected ecosystems that are prone to degradation, desertification and species extinction. This study focuses on land-use impacts of past wind power generation development in four Brazilian federal states, covering 80% of the country’s installed capacity. We assessed their spatial installation patterns, associated land-use and land cover change in the period before installation until 2018, and potential alternative installation locations, using a detailed wind turbine location database in combination with a high-resolution land-use and land cover map. In contrast to wind parks built in Europe, we found that 62% of the studied wind park area was covered by native vegetation and coastal sands. Overall, 3.2% of the total wind cluster area was converted from native vegetation to anthropogenic use. Wind parks installed mainly on native vegetation, on average, underwent higher land-use change compared to other wind parks. As Brazil intends to more than double its current wind power capacities by 2029, we explored possibilities to reduce environmental risks due to wind power expansion. We showed that this is feasible by integrating wind parks into human-altered areas, as sufficient wind resources there are available.

High-resolution large-scale onshore wind energy assessments: A review of potential definitions, methodologies and future research needs

“…For instance, J€ ager et al [3]. use assessments of landscape quality by citizens to differentiate between eligible and ineligible areas, resulting in an economic potential of 11.8e29.1 TWh in Baden-Württemberg, which is less than 50% of the technical potential, while Turkovska et al [223] exclude all land-use with low anthropogenic activity from wind power development. This is a pragmatic approach, but it does not reflect the complexities of real siting decisions and particularly the trade-offs between different siting scenarios.…”

“…Multi-criteria analysis can also be used in a multi-objective optimization framework. This approach allows to explicitly derive so-called efficient frontiers, which Public landscape scenicness evaluation of crowd-sourced geotagged photographs for all of Great Britain Great Britain [211] Avoidance of biodiversity impacts Exclusion of all natural vegetation areas based on land-use and land cover maps Brazil, Canada, global [223,225,226] Influence of wind turbines on property value…”

Combining Value-Focused Thinking and PROMETHEE Techniques for Selecting a Portfolio of Distributed Energy Generation Projects in the Brazilian Electricity Sector

“…Thus, the result can be explained because the selection of wind sources in the region avoids the use of water from dams that generate electricity in the region, considering that in recent years these reservoirs have been decreasing [52]. Thus, such grain crops, requiring irrigation at certain times of the year, can respect the flows of the region's rivers and, at the same time, have electricity from renewable technologies, respecting other regional characteristics [54].…”

The decline in specific power reduces wind power density and system efficiency

“…The number of installed wind turbines determines how much land has to be directly converted to host wind parks. However, depending on the wind park management in place, land in-between wind turbines, the so called spacing area, can also be affected [12]. Furthermore, land available for wind power generation is limited -for example, in Bavaria, Germany, legal restrictions regarding minimum distances to residential housing limits the land available for new wind parks to such an extent that a significant expansion of wind power is made impossible [13,14].…”