Land use limits the scale of fossil fuel energy alternatives

The alternatives to fossil fuels have several well-known problems, but land use is rarely raised as a limiting factor.  Generally this seems to be because only limited solutions for particular geographies are considered.  This is a simple analysis of land use for all energy for some major industrial countries.  It shows that nuclear, wind and ground solar are very constrained in their ability to scale to a full solution by land use limits alone.

LAND USE km2/TWh/y
                  Nuclear     Wind    Ground PV StratoSolar
exclusion       72            77               13          2.5
occupied       <1             2                13          <1

The table above shows land use in km2 per TWh per year for various energy alternatives.  Exclusion is land area affected but still available for limited use.  For nuclear the exclusion area is the international standard 30km radius evacuation zone.  This is the area of possible permanent contamination in a major accident and rationally should not include any major urbanization. We assume 5GW plants.  For wind the exclusion area is more restricted only allowing agriculture. The area estimate is based on NREL data and assumes an optimistic 5MW/km2. Ground PV exclusion allows for no other use.  StratoSolar exclusion use is similar to nuclear allowing anything but dense urban use.  Occupied shows the land area actually occupied.
                   EIA 2009                           km2           km2       km2             km2            km2
                   QuadBtu      TWh/y       nuclear       wind  ground PV   StratoSolar   Total Land
Japan          21.863          4,000       286,707       307,770     50,701        10,140           377,930
Germany     14.355          2,777       199,021       213,642     35,195          7,039           357,114
France         11.29           2,184       156,527       168,026     27,680          5,536           551,500
England        9.349          1,808       129,617       139,139     22,921          4,584           242,900
Spain           6.508           1,259        90,228         96,857     15,956          3,191           505,370
Italy              7.838           1,516      108,668       116,651     19,217          3,843           301,336
USA            99.278         19,203    1,376,412    1,477,528   243,403         48,681        9,526,468

The table above estimates the excluded land area required by each energy alternative to supply all current energy for the major industrialized countries listed and also lists the land area of each country.  This gives a sense of the scalability of the different resources.  It’s pretty clear that for Japan and Europe wind and nuclear don’t have the room to scale, and ground PV given that it fully uses the land it’s on is also implausibly large.  Even the US would find it practically and politically impossible to find the necessary land, once we exclude mountains, rivers and lakes.

The StratoSolar land area required is by far the smallest, and has the least impact on use, excluding only dense urban.  Based upon this data, StratoSolar is the only viable alternative for a complete energy solution not constrained by the availability of land.