TODAY’S STUDY: THE IMMENSE POTENTIAL OF U.S. NEW ENERGY ENNUMERATED

U.S. Renewable Energy Technical Potentials: A GIS-Based Analysis

Lopez, Roberts, Heimiller, Blair, and Porro, July 2012 (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Executive Summary

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) routinely estimates the technical potential of specific renewable electricity generation technologies. These are technology-specific estimates of energy generation potential based on renewable resource availability and quality, technical system performance, topographic limitations, environmental, and land-use constraints only. The estimates do not consider (in most cases) economic or market constraints, and therefore do not represent a level of renewable generation that might actually be deployed.

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This report is unique in unifying assumptions and application of methods employed to generate comparable estimates across technologies, where possible, to allow cross-technology comparison. Technical potential estimates for six different renewable energy technologies were calculated by NREL, and methods and results for several other renewable technologies from previously published reports are also presented. Table ES-1 summarizes the U.S. technical potential, in generation and capacity terms, of the technologies examined.

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The report first describes the methodology and assumptions for estimating the technical potential of each technology, and then briefly describes the resulting estimates. The results discussion includes state-level maps and tables containing available land area (square kilometers), installed capacity (gigawatts), and electric generation (gigawatt-hours) for each technology.

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Introduction

Renewable energy technical potential, as defined in this study, represents the achievable energy generation of a particular technology given system performance, topographic limitations, environmental, and land-use constraints. The primary benefit of assessing technical potential is that it establishes an upper-boundary estimate of development potential (DOE EERE 2006). It is important to understand that there are multiple types of potential—resource, technical, economic, and market—each seen in Figure 1 with its key assumptions.

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Although numerous studies have quantified renewable resource potential, comparing their results is difficult because of the different assumptions, methodologies, reporting units, and analysis time frames used (DOE EERE 2006). A national study of resource-based renewable energy technical potential across technologies has not been publicly available due to the challenges of unifying assumptions for all geographic areas and technologies (DOE EERE 2006).

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This report presents the state-level results of a spatial analysis calculating renewable energy technical potential, reporting available land area (square kilometers), installed capacity (gigawatts), and electric generation (gigawatt-hours) for six different renewable electricity generation technologies: utility-scale photovoltaics (both urban and rural), concentrating solar power, onshore wind power, offshore wind power, biopower, and enhanced geothermal systems. Each technology’s system-specific power density (or equivalent), capacity factor, and land-use constraints (Appendix A) were identified using published research, subject matter experts, and analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). System performance estimates rely heavily on NREL’s Systems Advisor Model (SAM)1 and Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS),2 a multiregional, multi-time period, geographic information system (GIS) and linear programming model. This report also presents technical potential findings for rooftop photovoltaic, hydrothermal, and hydropower in a similar format based solely on previous published reports.

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We provide methodological details of the analysis and references to the data sets used to ensure readers can directly assess the quality of data used, the data’s underlying uncertainty, and impact of assumptions. While the majority of the exclusions applied for this analysis focus on evaluating technical potential, we include some economic exclusion criteria based on current commercial configuration standards to provide a more reasonable and conservative estimation of renewable resource potential.

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Note that as a technical potential, rather than economic or market potential, these estimates do not consider availability of transmission infrastructure, costs, reliability or time-of-dispatch, current or future electricity loads, or relevant policies. Further, as this analysis does not allocate land for use by a particular technology, the same land area may be the basis for estimates of multiple technologies (i.e., non-excluded land is assumed to be available to support development of more than one technology).

Finally, since technical potential estimates are based in part on technology system performance, as these technologies evolve, their technical potential may also change.

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Discussion

Table 12 summarizes the estimated technical generation and capacity potential in the Unites States for each renewable electricity technology examined in this report. As estimates of technical, rather than economic or market, potential, these values do not consider:

• Allocation of available land among technologies (available land is generally assumed to be available to support development of more than one technology and each set of exclusions was applied independently)

• Availability of existing or planned transmission infrastructure that is necessary to tie generation into the electricity grid

• The relative reliability or time-of-productions of power

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• The cost associated with developing power at any location

• Presence of local, state, regional or national policies, either existing or potential, that could encourage renewable development

• The location or magnitude of current and potential electricity loads.

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While not a direct comparison, given the above considerations, one useful point of reference for the generation potential estimate is annual electricity retail sales in the United States. In 2010, aggregate sales for all 50 states were roughly 3,754 TWh…

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Updates to these technical potentials are possible on an ongoing basis as resource, system, exclusions and domain knowledge change and data sets improve in quality and resolution. In this study, we identified areas of potential improvements that include the acquisition of localized PV capacity factors, updated exclusion layers, and the use of updated land-cover data sets.

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