The US federal lands carry a technical potential to host more than 7.7 TW of onshore renewable energy capacity, according to a new interagency study led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Only 0.5% of the total federal land area in the contiguous US can host 51 GW to 84 GW capacity by 2035. This will be enough to provide up to about 10% of renewable energy needed by the country to reach net-zero emissions in the electricity sector. “The potential is far more than what will be needed to meet our future energy demands, creating opportunities for development that have low conflict with other uses,” said NREL’s Principal Investigator and Senior Energy Systems Researcher Trieu Mai. So far, the US Department of the Interior has permitted more than 30 GW of clean energy projects on federal lands through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Yet, at present, only 4% or 8.9 GW of the operational utility-scale onshore renewable energy capacity is located on federal lands in the country while 12% is used for oil drilling and 11% for natural gas production, according to the NREL study titled Land of Opportunity: Potential for Renewable Energy on Federal Lands. The agency used a power sector model for each of the 7 scenarios to determine what energy technologies can be built and where across the country to meet the future energy demand. These were then downscaled to producer deployment estimates on federal lands administered by the BLM, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Forest Service, the US Department of Defense, and the US Department of Energy. For utility-scale PV (UPV), the study estimates 44 million acres of federal land carries a technical potential for 5,750 GW. This covers the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia but excludes Alaska, Hawaii and US territories. Non-federal land, on the other hand, holds the potential for another 69.86 TW UPV. For wind energy, the technical potential on federal lands is lower at 875 GW, but it can be installed on 43 million acres. For enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), it estimates a technical potential for 975 GW to be installed on 27 million acres and 130 GW of hydrothermal potential on 12 million acres.
