Lovering, Swain, Blomqvist and Hernandez (University of Michigan, Breakthrough Institute, University of California Davis); published in PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science)
Land-use intensity of electricity (Lovering et al. 2022)
A synthesis of land use per unit of electricity for nuclear, geothermal, wind, residue and dedicated biomass, natural gas, hydroelectric dams, coal, concentrating solar and ground-mounted solar panels, in hectares occupied per terawatt-hour generated in a year (ha/TWh/y). Table 1 gives the median, mean, interquartile range (the width from the 25th to the 75th percentile, not the two quartiles), standard error and number of sites for each. Coal, natural gas, nuclear and dedicated biomass include the land used to mine, grow, process or transport their fuel; land to make panels, turbines and plants, transmission lines and offshore areas are not counted. Wind and natural gas have two values: the land physically occupied (footprint) and the whole area inside the site's boundary (spacing). Rooftop solar is assigned zero by assumption. Nuclear, wind and ground-mounted solar sites are in the United States, coal sites in the United States and Canada, dams in 80 countries.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- What the terms say
“This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-08; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- Lovering, J., Swain, M., Blomqvist, L. & Hernandez, R. R. (2022). Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow's energy landscape. PLOS ONE 17(7): e0270155. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0270155. CC BY 4.0.
- Copy of the raw file
- Allowed: we keep a public copy of every version we use.
- Cite as
- Lovering J, Swain M, Blomqvist L, Hernandez RR (2022) Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow's energy landscape. PLoS ONE 17(7): e0270155. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270155
Files
The article as JATS XML: Table 1 (table-wrap pone.0270155.t001) as a table of cells, the methods text that assigns rooftop solar zero, and the licence element. 159,635 bytes.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270155&type=manuscriptThe printed article (17 pages). Table 1 is text on page 8; the transform checks every row it reads from the XML against this printed table.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270155&type=printable
Status
- Programme
- Published 6 July 2022 (volume 17, issue 7) as a one-off study; no update is planned.
- Updates
- One-off (published 2022)
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:14:47Z)
- Independent sources measuring the same thing
- Power density of electricity generation (Nøland et al. 2022)