"That means to match the generation capacity of one coal-fired power plant (i.e. 1,000 MW, or 1 GW), you need 10,000 acres. That's 5X more land "
Are you implying that no land was used in the mining of the coal, and the transportation of the coal to the plant? This study is a bit old; solar is more efficient today.
"the land footprint of coal is about 20 percent bigger than the land footprint of solar thermal."
Which Has a Bigger Footprint, a Coal Plant or a Solar Farm?
Exploding the myth of "Concentrated Energy."—By Ted Nace
| Thu Nov. 18, 2010 2:11 PM EST
a reasonable estimate of the annual extent of surface mining, which accounts for 70 percent of US coal production, is 104,000 acres. An additional 15 percent of US coal is produced by an underground technique known as longwall mining, which causes land subsidence. Longwall affects 13,000 acres each year in ways that range from minor annoyance (cracked roads) to major damage (disappearance of streams and ponds). For anyone interested in seeing the full extent of longwall's effects on farms in southwestern Pennsylvania, Terri Taylor's documentary film Subsided Ground / Fallen Futures is an eye-opener.
Overall, based on figures compiled by the US Army Corps of Engineers for the years prior to the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and by the Office of Surface Mining for the subsequent years, approximately 8.4 million acres of land have been surface mined in the United States. Continuing the current rate of surface mining for the next 60 years would require about 7 million more acres to be surface mined or longwall mined—and that's based on the optimistic assumption that the quality of coal and the thickness of seams does not decline over time. In fact, such a decline is inevitable, based on the tendency to mine the best and most accessible coal first. So 7 million acres is a conservative estimate.
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