Renewable energy vs. the electric grid - Solar, Wind and Land: Conflicts in Renewable Energy Development - page 150

officials tend to have far less leeway in siting utility-scale solar plants and
wind farms. Sites that lack strong natural wind or solar resources are not
even worth considering for such projects, even if they would otherwise
be convenient based on their proximity to cities or existing transmission
corridors.
A large proportion of the world's most productive wind and solar energy
resources are found in remote areas that are hundreds of miles away
from major urban centers. Consequently, major transmission upgrades
or expansions are often necessary to connect new utility-scale renewable
energy projects to the grid. Existing electric transmission systems in most
of the world were primarily designed to distribute power from conven-
tional power plants to nearby end-users. These decades-old grids are often
incapable of delivering renewable power from the far-flung places where it
can be commercially harvested to electricity consumers. Due to these trans-
mission limitations, thousands of would-be wind farm and solar farm sites
around the globe today are little more than isolated islands of untapped
renewable energy sources.
The transmission challenges affecting wind energy developers in the
western United States exemplify how deficiencies in transmission infra-
structure can slow the pace of renewable energy development. As shown
in Table 7.1 below, the U.S. states with the best onshore wind energy
resources generally are situated in inland western and mid-western regions
of the country—“flyover states” where cities are relatively few and far
between. Of the top ten states for wind energy potential, only Texas has
a total population that ranks in the top twenty out of fifty states. Because
of relatively low population density in most of the United States' interior
west, the electric transmission infrastructure in this region has historically
been limited. These aging transmission facilities were largely designed based
on the assumption that a mix of hydropower and locally-sited conven-
tional power plants would continue to supply the region's energy for the

Table 7.1 The geographic mismatch between wind energy resources and
population density in the United States
Top ten U.S. states for wind energy
resources 4

Population rank in 2010 (out of 50
states) 5

1. North Dakota 48

2. Texas 2

3. Kansas 33

4. South Dakota 46

5. Montana 44

6. Nebraska 38

7. Wyoming 50

8. Oklahoma 28

9. Minnesota 21

10. Iowa 30