What is the total land required for the transition?
The direct clearing required for wind farms is a small percentage of the land that is under the footprint of the wind farm, as there needs to be a lot of space between the turbines. The Queensland Supergrid Blueprint estimates the requirement for land to build the 22 GW of renewables needed to 2035 at 580,000 hectares.
This assumes:
- 200 hectares of land per turbine in a wind farm
- 4 hectares of land per MW of solar farm
Note that the average land requirement of Queensland’s first three major wind farms, Coopers Gap, Kaban and Mt Emerald, has been 110 hectares per turbine. Similarly 4 ha/MW of solar is conservative, as the Queensland Solar Farm Guidelines estimate 3 hectares of land per MW capacity.
Transmission will also require a significant amount of clearing. Transmission often requires cleared corridors of 70 - 100m. If we assume a 200m corridor cleared for transmission, this could add up to 64,000 hectares to build 3,200 km of new transmission lines, including a duplication of the 275 kV line to Townsville and CopperString 2.0.
This could be 640,000 ha of land impacted. This is the total amount of land that would be leased by renewable companies but could still be used by agriculture, or retained as vegetated lands. The fraction of land actually cleared is a small percentage of this land.
The direct clearing required for wind farms is a small percentage of the land that is under the footprint of the wind farm, as there needs to be a lot of space between the turbines.