Reuters reports: A special uranium fuel planned for next-generation U.S. nuclear reactors poses security risks because it could be used without further enrichment as fissile material in nuclear weapons, scientists said in an article published on Thursday. The fuel, called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, is enriched to levels of up to 20%, compared with about 5% for the fuel that powers most existing reactors. Until recently it was made in commercial amounts only in Russia, but the United States wants to produce it to fuel a new wave of reactors... "This material is directly usable for making nuclear weapons without any further enrichment or reprocessing," said Scott Kemp, one of five authors of the peer-reviewed article in the journal Science. "In other words, the new reactors pose an unprecedented nuclear-security risk," said Kemp, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former science adviser on arms control at the State Department. A bomb similar in power to the one the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 could be made from 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) or less of 19.75% enriched HALEU, the article said. "Designing such a weapon would not be without its challenges, but there do not appear to be any convincing reasons why it could not be done," it said. The authors said if enrichment is limited to 10% to 12%, the supply chain would be far safer with only modest costs... TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that has received funding from the [U.S.] Energy Department, hopes to build its Natrium nuclear plant in Wyoming by 2030 to run on HALEU. TerraPower in late 2022 delayed Natrium's launch date by at least two years to 2030 due to a lack of HALEU. A TerraPower spokesperson said Natrium will use HALEU as it allows more efficient energy production and reduces nuclear waste volumes. "TerraPower has made reduction of weapons risks a foundational principle" the spokesperson said, adding that its fuel cycle eliminates the risk of proliferation. Reuters notes that America's 2022 climate legislation "included $700 million for a HALEU availability program including purchasing the fuel to create a supply chain for planned high-tech reactors." But the study's authors argue that if it becomes a standard reactor fuel, it could eliminate the distinction between peaceful and nonpeaceful nuclear programs — in countries around the world. Thanks to Slashdot reader locater16 for sharing the article.

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America "is now adding less wind capacity each year" than it was before the passage of a climate-protecting bill in 2022, according to the New York Times. Since then "solar panel installations are indeed soaring to record highs in the U.S., as are batteries that can store energy for later. But wind power has struggled, both on land and in the ocean." Some factors behind the wind industry's recent slowdown may be temporary, such as snarled supply chains. But wind power is also more vulnerable than solar power to many of the biggest logistical hurdles that hinder energy projects today: a lack of transmission lines, a lengthy permitting process and a growing backlash against new projects in many communities... [M]any areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid's capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade... Because they can reach the height of skyscrapers, wind turbines are more noticeable than solar farms and often attract more intense opposition from local communities. The wind industry has also been hampered by soaring equipment costs after the pandemic wrecked supply chains and inflation spiked. While those factors initially hurt solar, too, the solar industry has adjusted much faster, with China nearly doubling its manufacturing capacity for panels over the past two years. Wind supply chains, which are dominated by a few manufacturers in China, Europe and the United States, have yet to fully recover. The cost increases have been devastating for offshore wind projects in the Northeast, where developers have canceled more than half the projects they planned to build this decade. Wind isn't languishing only in the United States. While a record 117 gigawatts of new wind capacity came online last year globally, virtually all of that growth was in China. In the rest of the world, developers weren't installing wind turbines any faster than they were in 2020... It's still possible that wind power could rebound. In fact, some experts argue that the recent slowdown is only a temporary artifact of tax policy... [John Hensley, vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a renewable industry trade group] said that U.S. wind manufacturing was beginning to ramp up thanks to new tax incentives, while costs were starting to come down. Last year, orders for new turbines increased by 130%, although many of them won't be delivered until 2025 or later. Some states are now trying to make it easier to build renewable energy: Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota have all passed laws making it harder for local governments to restrict wind and solar. The federal government has issued new rules to accelerate the planning of transmission lines. Demand for wind could also rise as a growing number of states, tech companies and hydrogen producers are trying to secure clean electricity around the clock, rather than just a burst of solar power in the daytime. Many plans for moving America off fossil fuels "envision a large expansion of both solar and wind," the article points out, "because the two sources generate electricity at different hours and can complement each other. A boom in solar power alone, which runs only in daytime, isn't enough."

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Solar power in California has reached a new record output, briefly surpassing 100% of power demand. It comes just days after the state exceeded 100% of energy demand with renewables (wind, solar and hydro) over a record 45 days straight, and 69 out of 75. CleanTechnica reports: As you can see [here], at its peak, solar power was providing 102.1% of electricity demand in California. Together, wind, water, and solar peaked at 136.4% of electricity demand! [...] The best news is that California seems to quickly be chopping the duck curve down to size. [...] The solution for the duck curve is clear: energy storage. Store that bursting solar energy produced in the middle of the day and gradually use it in the evening as the sun goes down and electricity demand rises. The good news is that California has been making progress on this very fast! Look at the graph [here] regarding electricity generation from natural gas and note the line for 2023 versus the line for 2024. [...] The overall story is that California renewable energy continues to lead the way forward. Solar power is now peaking at more than 100% of electricity demand, renewables as a whole are peaking at 134% electricity demand, the duck curve has been shaved down to basically no duck curve at all (but you could now call the battery charge/discharge curve a duck curve), and the whole state (and world) is benefitting. Get ready for more records in the days to come. We're still a few weeks away from the summer solstice. Further reading: Battery-Powered California Faces Lower Blackout Risk This Summer

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"There is one big thing holding the United States back from a pollution-free electricity grid running on wind, solar and battery power," writes the Washington Post. "Not enough power lines... the nation's sagging, out-of-date power lines are being overwhelmed — slowing the transition to clean energy and the fight against climate change." But experts say that there is a remarkably simple fix: installing new wires on the high-voltage lines that already carry power hundreds of miles across the United States. Just upgrading those wires, new reports show, could double the amount of power that can flow through America's electricity grid... Most of America's lines are wired with a technology that has been around since the early 1900s — a core steel wire surrounded by strands of aluminum. When those old wires heat up — whether from power passing through them or warm outdoor temperatures — they sag. Too much sag in a transmission line can be dangerous, causing fires or outages. As a result, grid operators have to be careful not to allow too much power through the lines. But a couple of decades ago, engineers designed a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. Those new, carbon-fiber wires don't sag as much in the heat. That means that they can take up to double the amount of power as the old lines. According to the recent study from researchers at UC-Berkeley and GridLab, replacing these older steel wires could provide up to 80 percent of the new transmission needed on the electricity grid — without building anything new. It could also cost half as much as building an entirely new line and avoid the headaches of trying to get every state, city and even landowner along the route to agree to a new project... If stringing new lines is so easy — and cheap — why hasn't it been done already? Part of the problem, experts say, is that utilities profit more from big infrastructure projects. Routine maintenance or larger-scale upgrades of the electricity grid don't help utilities make a lot of cash compared with building new transmission lines... Duncan Callaway, a professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley and one of the authors of the recent study, said that many transmission engineers are not used to thinking of rewiring as one of their tools. "But it's a much faster way," he said. Some changes are already underway to encourage this approach. For a long time, utilities had to undergo lengthy environmental reviews if they were rewiring a line longer than 20 miles. Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that those would no longer be necessary if utilities are simply replacing wires.

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the announcement of a new report from the International Energy Forum: The seemingly universal presumption persists that the copper needed for the green transition will somehow be available... This paper addresses this issue by projecting copper supply and demand from 2018 to 2050 and placing both in the historical context of copper mine output... Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed... Our main purpose... is to communicate the magnitude of the copper mining challenge to the broader public that is less familiar with upstream resource issues. "On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining..." the report points out. Wikipedia describes the non-profit as a 73-country organization promoting dialogue about the world's energy needs. The group's announcement ends with a hope that the report "will promote discussion and formulation of alternative policies to be certain the developing world can catch up with the developed world while global initiatives advance with the green energy transition."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California expects to avoid rolling blackouts this summer as new solar plants and large batteries plug into the state's grid at a rapid clip. The state's electricity system has been strained by years of drought, wildfires that knock out transmission lines and record-setting heat waves. But officials forecast Wednesday new resources added to the grid in the last four years would give California ample supplies for typical summer weather. Since 2020, California has added 18.5 gigawatts of new resources. Of that, 6.6 gigawatts were batteries, 6.3 gigawatts were solar and 1.4 gigawatts were a combination of solar and storage. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. In addition, the state's hydropower plants will be a reliable source of electricity after two wet winters in a row ended California's most recent drought. Those supplies would hold even if California experiences another heat wave as severe as the one that triggered rolling blackouts across the state in August 2020, officials said in a briefing Wednesday. In the most dire circumstances, the state now has backup resources that can supply an extra 5 gigawatts of electricity, including gas-fired power plants that only run during emergencies.

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Data centers could use up to 9% of total electricity generated in the United States by the end of the decade, more than doubling their current consumption, as technology companies pour funds into expanding their computing hubs, the Electric Power Research Institute said on Wednesday. From a report: Depending on the adoption pace of technology such as generative artificial intelligence, which is fueling the expansion of data centers, and the energy efficiency of new centers, the estimated annual growth rate of electricity use by the industry ranges from 3.7% to 15% through 2030, the institute's analysis said. The institute is a U.S.-based research organization funded by energy and government organizations. Data centers, along with expanding domestic manufacturing and electrification of transportation, are lifting the U.S. electricity industry out of two decades of flat growth. The centers require massive amounts of power for high-intensity computing and cooling systems, with a new large data center requiring the same amount of electricity needed to power 750,000 homes, according to numerous energy company earnings calls this year.

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This week the Washington Post noted that just last year nearly 1.2 million more electric vehicles were sold in America, "accounting for over 7 percent of total new car sales and a new national record." But "data show that EV sales are far outpacing growth in the U.S. charging network... In 2016, there were seven electric cars for each public charging point; today, there's more than 20 electric cars per charger." The article points out that 80% of America's EV's are just charging at home, according to the U.S. Energy Department. (Which seems to leave one public charger for every four EVs that don't charge at home.) And the article notes several other important caveats: Experts say that there is no "magic number" for the best ratio of EVs on the road to public chargers. "It absolutely depends on the local landscape," said Peter Slowik, U.S. passenger vehicles lead for the International Council on Clean Transportation. Globally, there is about 1 public charger for every 11 EVs, according to the International Energy Agency. But in countries where there are more single-family homes and garages, the ratio could be lower.... In a way, the United States' slow charging build-out could be a benefit in the long-term: Many automakers have now promised to switch to Tesla's charging connector in the next few years, which could help put most cars on the same system. Not everyone agrees there is a delay. Slowik says that his team's research shows that the United States is on-track for building out the charging needed over the next eight years. An increase in the number of EVs per public charger is a natural part of the adoption process, he argues, that will subside with more sales and as more chargers come online. Still, the article argues if Americans continue buying electric cars, public chargers will be essential "to support long road trips, help apartment-dwellers go electric and alleviate overnight pressure on electricity grids." Today U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reiterated America's commitment to having a national network of 500,000 charges by 2030, saying the country is at "the absolute very, very beginning stages of the construction to come."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Sunny days in Germany mean gray clouds for solar profitability as the nation's dive into renewables has left it with too much energy. According to a note from SEB Research, in the past 10 days, solar producers have had to take an 87% price cut during production hours. In fact, when production peaks, prices have slid well below zero. On average, the price received was 9.1 euros per megawatt-hour, significantly under the 70.6 euros paid during non-solar-power hours. "This is what happens to power prices when the volume of unregulated power becomes equally big or bigger than demand: Prices collapse when unregulated power produces the most," the Swedish bank wrote on Tuesday. Last year's record wave of solar installations are what's driving Germany's price "destruction" as inventory outpaces consumption. While total solar capacity topped 81.7 gigawatts by 2023's end, demand load only reached 52.2 gigawatts, noted SEB chief commodities analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. The difference between the two actually widens even more in the summer, a season of peak production and lower demand. This also means that consumers are not necessarily benefiting from the low prices, as they typically consume more energy in non-solar hours. Unless new installations are spurred on by subsidies or power purchase agreements, oppressed profitability could eventually halt Germany's solar expansion, Schieldrop said. Instead, focus is likely to move onto improvements that will make more use of the energy produced, such as investments in batteries and grid infrastructure. "This will over time exhaust the availability of 'free power' and drive solar-hour-power-prices back up," Schieldrop wrote. "This again will then eventually open for renewed growth in solar power capacity growth."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 69 of the past 75 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson continues to track California's renewables performance – and it's still exciting. In an update today on Twitter (X), Jacobson reports that California has now exceeded 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 45 days straight, and 69 out of 75. [...] Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035. California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade? We hope so. It's going to be exciting to watch. Further reading: California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days

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According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the U.S. has officially surpassed 5 million solar installations. "The 5 million milestone comes just eight years after the U.S. achieved its first million in 2016 -- a stark contrast to the four decades it took to reach that initial milestone since the first grid-connected solar project in 1973," reports Electrek. From the report: Since the beginning of 2020, more than half of all U.S. solar installations have come online, and over 25% have been activated since the Inflation Reduction Act became law 20 months ago. Solar arrays have been installed on homes and businesses and as utility-scale solar farms. The U.S. solar market was valued at $51 billion in 2023. Even with changes in state policies, market trends indicate robust growth in solar installations across the U.S. According to SEIA forecasts, the number of solar installations is expected to double to 10 million by 2030 and triple to 15 million by 2034. The residential sector represents 97% of all U.S. solar installations. This sector has consistently set new records for annual installations over the past several years, achieving new highs for five straight years and in 10 out of the last 12 years. The significant growth in residential solar can be attributed to its proven value as an investment for homeowners who wish to manage their energy costs more effectively. California is the frontrunner with 2 million solar installations, though recent state policies have significantly damaged its rooftop solar market. Meanwhile, other states are experiencing rapid growth. For example, Illinois, which had only 2,500 solar installations in 2017, now boasts over 87,000. Similarly, Florida has seen its solar installations surge from 22,000 in 2017 to 235,000 today. By 2030, 22 states or territories are anticipated to surpass 100,000 solar installations. The U.S. has enough solar installed to cover every residential rooftop in the Four Corners states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

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Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which controls interstate energy infrastructure, approved a rule Monday that should boost new transmission infrastructure and make it easier to connect renewable energy projects. (More coverage here, here, and here.) Some 11,000 projects totaling 2,600 GW of capacity are in planning, waiting to break ground, or connect to the grid. But they're stymied by the need for costly upgrades, or simply waiting for review. The frustrations are many. Each proposed project undergoes a lengthy grid-impact study and assessed the cost of necessary upgrades. Each project is considered in isolation, regardless of whether similar projects are happening nearby that could share the upgrade costs or auger different improvements. The planning process tends to be reactive -- examining only the applications in front of them -- rather than considering trends over the coming years. It's a first-come, first-served queue: if one project is ready to break ground, it must wait behind another project that's still securing funding or permitting. Two years in development, the dryly-named Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements directs utility operators to plan infrastructure improvements with a 20-yr forecast of new energy sources and increased demand. Rather than examining each project in isolation, similar projects will be clustered and examined together. Instead of a First-Come, First-Served serial process, operators will instead examine First-Ready, allowing shovel-ready projects to jump the queue. The expectation is that these new rules will speed up and streamline the process of developing and connecting new energy projects through more holistic planning, penalties for delays, sensible cost-sharing for upgrades, and justification for long-term investments.

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Researchers believe they've discovered a new material structure that can improve the energy storage of capacitors. The structure allows for storage while improving the efficiency of ultrafast charging and discharging. The new find needs optimization but has the potential to help power electric vehicles. * An anonymous reader shared this report from Popular Mechanics: In a study published in Science, lead author Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, demonstrates a novel heterostructure that curbs energy loss, enabling capacitors to store more energy and charge rapidly without sacrificing durability... Within capacitors, ferroelectric materials offer high maximum polarization. That's useful for ultra-fast charging and discharging, but it can limit the effectiveness of energy storage or the "relaxation time" of a conductor. "This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems," the study authors write. Bae makes the change — one he unearthed while working on something completely different — by sandwiching 2D and 3D materials in atomically thin layers, using chemical and nonchemical bonds between each layer. He says a thin 3D core inserts between two outer 2D layers to produce a stack that's only 30 nanometers thick, about 1/10th that of an average virus particle... The sandwich structure isn't quite fully conductive or nonconductive. This semiconducting material, then, allows the energy storage, with a density up to 19 times higher than commercially available ferroelectric capacitors, while still achieving 90 percent efficiency — also better than what's currently available. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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The Royal Institution of Australia is a national non-profit hub for science communication, publishing the science magazine Cosmos four times a year. This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors "don't add up as a viable energy source." Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States. The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US. Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical. The cost was four to six times the cost of the same electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants, according to estimates from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Australian Energy Market Operator. "The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables," the article agues: Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation, and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges. One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors... Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world's electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate. The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening. Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

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A tokamak in France achieved a new record in fusion plasma by using tungsten to encase its reaction, which enabled the sustainment of hotter and denser plasma for longer periods than previous carbon-based designs. Quartz reports: A tokamak is a torus- (doughnut-) shaped fusion device that confines plasma using magnetic fields, allowing scientists to fiddle with the superheated material and induce fusion reactions. The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a tokamak operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). WEST was injected with 1.15 gigajoules of power and sustained a plasma of about 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes. It achieved this record after scientists encased the tokamak's interior in tungsten, a metal with an extraordinarily high melting point. Researchers from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used an X-ray detector inside the tokamak to measure aspects of the plasma and the conditions that made it possible. "These are beautiful results," said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. "We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall."

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ArchieBunker quotes a report from Bloomberg: Texas electricity prices soared almost 100-fold as a high number of power-plant outages raised concerns of a potential evening shortfall. Spot prices at the North Hub, which includes Dallas, jumped to more than $3,000 a megawatt-hour just before 7 p.m. local time, versus about $32 at the same time Tuesday, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. This morning, Ercot, as the state's main grid operator is known, issued a "watch" for a potential capacity reserve shortage from about 7-9 p.m., meaning the buffer of spare supplies could fall to low enough levels to call on back-up generation, cancel or delay outages or curb usage. The conditions are the tightest of the year so far and raises the risk of prices rising to the $5,000 cap -- which they last did on April 16, when Ercot also warned of a potential shortfall. Unusually hot weather in the region has boosted demand for cooling and lowered the efficiency of many power plants. Wind output has also fallen from a day earlier and there are more outages. "Ercot has not called for conservation this evening," it said by email. "The grid is operating under normal conditions at this time."

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Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world's electricity for the first time last year, according to climate thinktank Ember. The Guardian reports: Clean electricity has already helped to slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds in the past 10 years, according to the report by climate thinktank Ember. It found that renewables have grown from 19% of electricity in 2000 to more than 30% of global electricity last year. Solar was the main supplier of electricity growth, according to Ember, adding more than twice as much new electricity generation as coal in 2023. It was the fastest-growing source of electricity for the 19th consecutive year, and also became the largest source of new electricity for the second year running, after surpassing wind power. The first comprehensive review of global electricity data covers 80 countries, which represent 92% of the world's electricity demand, as well as historic data for 215 countries. The surge in clean electricity is expected to power a 2% decrease in global fossil fuel generation in the year ahead, according to Ember. [...] World leaders are aiming to grow renewables to 60% of global electricity by 2030 under an agreement struck at the UN's Cop28 climate change conference in December. This would require countries to triple their current renewable electricity capacity in the next six years, which would almost halve power sector emissions.

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The Washington Post reports that wind turbines "only take up five percent of the land where they've been built, new research shows." The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology. This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm. The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land. "Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things ... can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people," said Sarah Jordaan, the study's principal investigator. Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study's findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.

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The Washington Post reports that wind turbines "only take up five percent of the land where they've been built, new research shows." The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology. This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm. The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land. "Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things ... can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people," said Sarah Jordaan, the study's principal investigator. Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study's findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.

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