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Rooftop photovoltaic systems can help make solar power’s land use more efficient, a new study by McGill University has found.
Researchers at McGill used AI-based tools to measure the land footprint of large solar installations across the western United States, quantifying the land-use requirements of some 719 solar photovoltaic projects, and seeking to determine the potential for solar expansion while minimising pressure on available land.
“Solar photovoltaics are poised to become the largest renewable energy source globally by 2029, but both data and methods are lacking to understand the consequences of large scale growth to land,” commented Sarah Marie Jordaan, associate professor in McGill’s Department of Civil Engineering.
As the research found, land-use efficiency various greatly depending on engineering design and geographic location, with projects in sunnier regions and those with more compact designs requiring less land per unit of electricity generated.
As it found, rooftop solar offers ‘significant land-sparing potential’, with the cost gap between rooftop and ground-mounted systems varying significantly from region to region.
“This study delivers a much-needed, comprehensive evaluation of global solar-land relationships and their techno-economic implications,” Jordaan added.
“Solar projects can result in substantial environmental impacts locally, but our results found that reaching net-zero emissions with high growth in solar requires a negligible amount of land globally. There are substantial differences in costs and regional land availability, where targeted, region-specific policy design can support land-sparing options like rooftop solar.”
Two studies formed part of McGill’s research – Quantifying land-use metrics for solar photovoltaic projects in the western United States was published in Communications Earth & Environment, while Global land and solar energy relationships for sustainability was published in Joule.
The research was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Read more here.
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