Strategic land use analysis for solar energy development in New York State

Reacting to the Rural Burden: Understanding Opposition to Utility‐Scale Solar Development in Upstate New York☆

“…In 2020, New York enacted what state officials refer to as “the most ambitious and comprehensive climate and clean energy law in the Nation (DPS and NYSERDA 2020:1).” Notably, the law calls for economy‐wide decarbonization by the year 2050. As of 2018, only about 27 percent of the state's electricity was supplied by renewable sources, necessitating substantial renewable energy development from wind and solar in the coming years (Katkar et al 2021). A core challenge in meeting state targets is the energy demand of the downstate region, which accounts for about two‐thirds of state consumption currently supplied by almost 70 percent fossil fuel‐fired generation.…”

“…Until recently, most of the development of USS facilities in the United States was geographically targeted to the public lands of the desert southwest (Mulvaney 2017). In our study context of New York state, 84 percent of suitable land for future USS is agricultural (Katkar et al 2021). While there is no universal size threshold for characterizing USS (Bolinger et al 2017), we use this term here to refer to projects of at least 20 MW capacity, or approximately 120 acres of solar paneling, although many proposed projects are much larger.…”

Solar energy development on farmland: Three prevalent perspectives of conflict, synergy and compromise in the United States

“…As noted in the introduction, it is important to reiterate that solar energy development's focus on farmland is partially because this spares development of land that is important to biodiversity [32,33], as industrial farmland is already ecologically compromised [33,34]. Nonetheless, there have been further arguments posit that solar energy development should focus also on sparing farmland, especially for land that has been designated as "prime" [24,[35][36][37] a label often based on soil classification for land considered most important for agriculture. These arguments advance that grid-scale solar energy should be placed on already developed sites, such as parking lots, building structures, saline soils (or degraded farmland), brownfields, and reservoirs [38].…”

Re-powering the Nature-Intensive Systems: Insights From Linking Nature-Based Solutions and Energy Transition

“…Renewable energy is scattered widely and unevenly throughout the land, and its ability to be harvested is largely dependent on specific physical, biophysical, cultural, and social landscape qualities that may be significantly more prominent in some locations than in others (Nadaï and van der Horst, 2010;De Boer et al, 2018). As the solar power or other renewable energies development are rapidly growing, conflicts over land usage and environmental justice issues are gaining traction (Katkar et al, 2021;Sareen, 2021). The re-composition of socio-technical relations so-called "energy landscape" between landscape and energy might be viewed because of this spatial impact.…”