In April of 2020 Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers issued Executive Order 38, which asks the state to consume only 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050. This report answers the questions: how much additional carbon-free electricity production will Wisconsin need to meet 100% of electricity demand by 2050? And how much space (in acres) will this additional production capacity occupy in the state?
For this report, it was assumed that additional carbon-free electricity development in Wisconsin will come from wind and solar power, with the majority coming from solar. Electrical demand was projected out to 2050 using Ordinary Least Squares linear regression. It was estimated that in the year 2050 Wisconsin will consume 76,660,526 MWh of electricity. Four future scenarios were then considered: scenarios 1 and 3 where Wisconsin produces as much electricity as it consumes, and 2 and 4 where it imports electricity at the historical average of 10.4% of consumption per year. Scenarios 1 and 2 also drew from the current technological capacity of Wisconsin’s solar production (which uses primarily single-axis tracking solar panels), while scenarios 3 and 4 assumed that the recent innovation of bifacial solar panels would be widely adopted and thereby increase the production capacity of a given area of solar panels. Of these, scenario 2 was considered the most likely future outcome, with scenario 4 the second most likely. In these scenarios, Wisconsin would need to produce 68,673,678 MWh per year and would import 7,986,848 MWh per year. By 2022 Wisconsin will have the capacity to produce an estimated 7,030,903 MWh of carbon-free electricity (from hydropower, wind, and solar), requiring an increase of 69,629,624 MWh by 2050.
To estimate the spatial resources needed to produce these 70,000,000 MWh of electricity required measures of the acres per MW capacity for wind and solar generation facilities. In Wisconsin, it was calculated that the direct impact (area covered by physical infrastructure) of wind power is 0.7 acres/MW, while the generation footprint (boundary of the project area) of wind power is 45.2 acres/MW. For solar power, the direct impact is 6.35 acres/MW and generation footprint is 12.4 acres/MW.
Across all four scenarios of electricity generation where wind and solar power ranged from providing zero to 100% of annual electricity, direct impact ranged from 18,110 to 215,412 acres and generation footprint ranged from 258,845 to 1,319,097 acres. Under the most likely scenario (2) and where solar power constituted 50% or more of annual generation, direct impact ranged from 104,406 to 190,703 acres and generation footprint ranged from 373,031 to 770,411 acres. Wind and solar power plants in Wisconsin are almost exclusively sited on or near agricultural fields, primarily for reasons of ready and available space. Therefore, estimates of area are also presented as a percentage of Wisconsin’s 14.3 million acres of agricultural land. Across all scenarios the range in direct impact is from 0.13% to 1.51% of agricultural land, while generation footprint ranges from 1.81% to 9.22% of agricultural lands. For the most likely outcome (scenario 2 with solar ≥ 50%), direct impact ranges from 0.73% to 1.33% of agricultural land, and generation footprint ranges from 2.61% to 5.39% of agricultural land.
