 Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for the third installation of our U.S. Pathways Project webinar series. Last month we heard from Michael Ginsberg on the research and development priorities for deep decarbonization. And also Aaron Mayfield who talked about the issues of employment in the low carbon transition. So today we're changing gears a little bit and we're going to hear from Grace Wu who is going to talk about the geospatial analysis and planning in the low carbon transition. Grace is joining us as a Smith Conservation Fellow. She also works with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the Nature Conservancy. And she is participating in the white paper that we're currently working on. So Grace is going to walk through her research to date and some of the points that she's found so far. And then we will open it up for input. And if you're listening to this recording in the future, we welcome you to provide any questions or resources to Grace through email. So without further ado, I will hand it over to you, Grace. Great. Thank you, Elena. So I'm just going to jump right into it. Thank you for the introduction. So here is the outline for the chapter. It will start out with a motivation for why spatial planning is in this white paper and in particular why it's a critical component of planning low carbon pathways. Within the section, there are two areas of focus. The first is renewable energy infrastructure in particular with an emphasis on wind and solar technologies and supporting transmission infrastructure. And the second part looks at the reason why agricultural forestry and other land use spatial planning is also critical. In the second part of the paper, we present several frameworks for how policymakers and planners can actually integrate land use into energy planning. Providing an example from California that looks specifically at wind and solar energy infrastructure buildouts. How we used maps of resource areas combined with environmental and social constraints to produce maps for where we could cite renewable energy infrastructure and then examine their impacts on planning of other generation sources and then cause system cost impacts. So within that, we do a site selection process and then there's a transmission path modeling so that we can look at the entire buildout in a spatially explicit manner. The second component of the framework section looks at the tools that have been used for examining the role of the ag forestry and other land use sectors and how we can anticipate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and greenhouse gas sinks in the forestry and ag sector. And specifically within this area, we also look at how biofuel or biomass facilities can be cited in addition to how much feedstock will we can get from the remaining land area that's not in competition with food production. And then the other non-energy sector emissions so primarily where we'll manage forestry and how do we anticipate that and enable more carbon storage in forest lands. And finally, the last section of the paper summarizes points and more importantly makes recommendations for policymakers and funders and planners both federally and regionally. And so there's an emphasis both on federal level action as well as state level enabling actions. So in this presentation, I'll primarily be focusing on those areas that have been bolded which are the renewable energy sections within each of the three primary areas mostly because this is still a work in progress and these are the areas that are better have been better developed in other works that I've been involved in. So to start to give you a sense of what this motivation section would look like the purpose is to answer this question of why a low carbon transition is truly also a land use transition. The figure that you see here on the left shows the sinks globally of CO2 absorbed and as you can tell the land sink which comprises plants and soils is a very critical land sink and also one of the most variable and vulnerable as the figure really shows. So in this really clear way a low carbon transition really requires us to manage these land resources to protect or enhance this carbon sink. On the flip side from the greenhouse gas emissions point of view, this is a figure of global carbon emissions by sector. We can readily see that solutions to at least 25% of the emissions from the ag and forestry sector will need to come from changes in the way we manage land. So this means avoiding deforestation, increased covercropping or extending forest timber harvest rotations. We also know that the solutions for electricity sector emissions will require a lot of clean and renewable energy really all of which require land definitely some technologies more than others. The solutions for decarbonizing these other uses of energy will also require new sources of clean and renewable fuels or electricity which really further increases the amount of land for renewable energy generation that's required. So to motivate this now within the context of the US we'll provide some examples of previous deep decarbonization studies at the national level that provide various technology mixes that's required to meet mid-century climate targets for the US. So this is a figure of the land area required for utility scale onshore wind and solar farms in the US to achieve deep decarbonization by mid-century using the closest approximate states land area. Though the direct wind turbine impact so here you see New Mexico the wind farm areas is the area of New Mexico the direct impact will only be about 1% of this land area but really signing an area the size of New Mexico will with wind farms will be no easy feat nor will siting about 26,000 square kilometers of solar PV which is about the land area of Vermont. This is the amount of land that will either need to be converted or managed very differently and when contrasted visually with the types of land available in the US the vast amount of cropland that you can see in the top right and the amount of protected areas in the bottom right you really show you really can see that the potential siding trade-offs and synergies will need to be mitigated. This is something that we need to manage and anticipate in order to achieve our climate goals. Without going into quantitative estimate of why siding is a critical barrier to renewable energy development we can already see in headlines that are that have really come in the wake of some of the largest solar and wind installations and a lot of these examples come from California which is where solar development has been ongoing at a very rapid pace in just the last five to seven years. So this has really been a green versus green paradox and a lot of environmentalists are being pitted against each other because of siding issues and the reasons for that are are real that there are truly endangered species at risk depending on where what sites are chosen. There are large bird mortalities and depending on the operations of these wind farms they may or may not be more severe and there are mitigation opportunities that can be pursued. The last headline on the very bottom was something fairly recent just in the last year. The largest county actually in the U.S. basically put a halt on large solar installations and this is an indication of decisions to come as we scale up even further than we need to be able to prevent these types of roadblocks from happening. So a recent study that's still under review and in a form of a report looks at what the risk to developers are for siding in high risk areas. So this is an example of wind development in the wind belt which is primarily in the Great Plains of the U.S. And as you can see on the map the authors of the study mapped out low and high risk areas. This is a map of those low risk areas in the wind belt and they looked at where projects have been canceled and proceeded and then they also looked at whether or not there was favorable or unfavorable publicity for those particular projects and they found that an astounding 50 percent, that projects were 50 percent less likely to be canceled when they were located in one of these green low risk areas compared to the higher risk areas. And they were actually less likely to be canceled if they, a 25 percent decrease in cancellation if they receive positive publicity that comes with more favorable press especially from the environmental community. So getting various actors on board and having some consensus building around siding seems to play a very large role in the success of projects. One other aspect of siding that should really be considered especially by energy developers in the short term and the reason, the really the motivation for why we need spatial planning that integrates land use in existing energy planning process is that we've seen across now several studies for the US both nationally and regionally that there are cost impacts to how sites are selected and this figure from a study that NREL conducted in 2016 shows two supply curves so for wind. On the x-axis you'll see capacity and gigawatts of wind potential and then on the y-axis you'll see the change in levelized costs of electricity and dollars per megawatt hour. The two lines show two different siding scenarios in which there the types of siding constraints were modified and also the degree to which the the stringency of those criteria were changed. So in the high siding scenario we, they applied the highest stringency across wildlife radar and distance to human settlement elements and then they relaxed those in the moderate scenario and as you can see the the two lines diverged pretty dramatically. At around 500 gigawatts of capacity which is in some studies especially some of the earlier NREL studies showed that this is the amount of capacity we'll need by mid-century for the US of onshore. You can see marginally that at 500 the change the difference in cost will be 20% greater increase in levelized cost over the base case and around 5% increase over the moderate siding scenario. Other studies like the deep decarbonization pathways project which is affiliated with this particular write paper looked at more ambitious decarbonization scenarios and a large much larger penetration of electrification and they found that we actually need about a thousand gigawatts of wind by mid-century and that really puts us up at this very end of this divergence and we can see that between we're going to be experiencing between 40 to 45 percent cost increase because of siding restrictions. So being able to anticipate that account for that in the modeling process and understand how we can mitigate those costs by looking at other technologies those are all important considerations given the trends that we can already anticipate. So given those this need for looking at siding constraints we there seems to be this also this need for a framework that allows us to do this type of anticipation in a systematic way and so we need a way to help us figure out the amount of land use for energy infrastructure and where we need to be able to anticipate some of those impacts on habitat and on communities. We need to understand how those impacts could actually be in turn constraints on energy infrastructure. So the example earlier providing that 50 percent reduce likelihood of project cancellation when those constraints are not there we need a better understanding of that and whether any of the above affect these electricity system costs and other considerations and energy planning such as the amount of battery storage or the amount of PV or offshore or hydrogen or any other levers that we could affect that siding could could require more of. So to provide an example of what a framework could look like here I'll provide an overview of a process called Integrative Resource Planning or IRP for short. This is a planning or an investment planning process that many jurisdictions in the U.S. have adopted and now several internationally and it's used in both like semi deregulated and regulated energy markets. At the heart of this planning process is a capacity expansion production cost model and this is an optimization model that allows energy planners to determine the optimal mix of various types of low carbon and fossil fuel technologies that will meet the demand by a certain year. So what they what one of the main inputs is really this load forecast and this is also assuming a certain level of energy efficiency in the end flexible loads and of course for deep decarbonization scenarios this involves assumptions about vehicle and building electrification. So the spatial dimension of this capacity modeling process really comes from the renewable resource assessment and what we're we've called renewable energy zones so areas where energy renewable energy infrastructure can be developed and this is really informed by spatially explicit inputs of available land and that's informed by environmental and social constraints and all of that is put into a supply curve and provide as an input into this model. At the same time we consider anything that's existing and proposed so that we're not double counting land area and a lot of people ask about distributed energy resources and the role that that can play in energy planning especially to offset some of the impacts that we see with utility scale and this is where we would come in with this is an exogenous assumption it we take it out of the load forecast and we can then inform the amount of renewable energy that must be met through utility scale. And finally the production cost the capacity expansion model considers several constraints one of the most important being greenhouse gas emissions by certain target dates and with that it produces these optimal or candidate portfolios of resource mixes and the downstream use of these optimal portfolios is to do a series of risk assessments some of which are very common across many IRPs but some of the ones including conservation impact and risk and other land use impacts are currently not used widely in practice. California is actually one of the very few states that do are considering any kind of land use impact analysis as part of their IRP process and then of course if any of these don't none of the portfolios meet these requirements the the process happens again and then finally the optimal portfolios are updated with cost impact metrics and then with those metrics there's a portfolio selection process and then a preferred portfolio is selected so the purpose of an integrated a land and energy integrated framework would include this upstream available land informed input and as well as in another intervention in the analysis the compliance check and sensitivity analysis portion of the IRP that then allows land used to be considered in a portfolio selection process which currently is not being included so this is an overview of what I mean by that and in just four steps so we start out that this resource mapping that's basically explicit that considers conservation and social impacts and we perform the capacity expansion optimization downstream of that we need to gather the social and and environmental impact so we do that by spatially explicitly modeling the build out of all the wind and solar and transmission and then we perform an environmental a strategic environmental assessment of that build out here is a more detailed explanation of what this means and I'll I'll just go I know it's a very busy figure but I wanted to point out in particular those the blue boxes of this process that are spatially explicit and truly what makes this an integrative approach that was not that previously did not exist in resource planning so in the first step we gather all of the environmental data so these are maps of where prime farmland range lands important bird areas wildlife corridors are located and these are all spatially explicit inputs and outputs in bloom this gets fed into a site suitability model in which we use other spatially explicit information and we model areas where we can build wind and solar power plants or site transmission lines and this is a figure on the right a thumbnail of of what a solar resource staff looks like for the western us and then we aggregate that into something that's non-spatial which is the supply curve and that's traditionally what's used in a capacity expansion book sorry a capacity expansion model and the capacity expansion model as I mentioned earlier produces these optimal candidate portfolios and these are primarily in the form of megawatt or megawatt hours of certain types of technologies and here's an example of of what I mean by that so these are stacks of scenarios these are different portfolios and you can see that there are differences in the need for different types of technologies solar wind being the dominant technologies that are being relied upon but also geothermal and some distro and quite a bit of distributed PV so these are non-spatial as you can see in the bar chart what we then need to do out of this traditional IRP process is then do an optimal site selection transmission modeling and what we get out of this process are located actual locations of generation and transmission needs so in the figure in the the small thumbnail you can see like these areas that have in orange which are the solar PV build out locations and then the areas in blue are when selective wind locations so now we have these footprints for where power plants should be cited for each of these portfolios we can then pair that now with these ecological and environmental social data some of which come from our environmental data collection and we can do an environmental impact assessment so we can actually calculate the amount of sensitive land area impacted within each portfolio for each of those data sets that we deem are important for energy signing so this is an example of what I mean by these build out so these are spatially explicit meaning they have a footprint and an area located in somewhere geographically and these two maps show two different scenarios they differ in what types of land were excluded from the site selection process on the left you see the the high impact so the higher the impact the more sensitive habitat or critical habitat or important burn areas would be affected or prime farmland on the low impact side these are areas that have lower conservation and social value that have been developed and as you can see these buildouts look very different from each other so this is the value of doing the spatial explicit modeling and now as I said with these footprints we can also then take the footprints and figure out what the transmission requirements are to to interconnect these new generation locations to the existing grid and so everything that you see in blue are modeled and sites and wind sites that have been selected for each portfolio and everything in gray are existing transmission lines and all the green are planned or proposed lines in advanced stages of development and everything in red are the modeled interconnection gen tie lines that will ensure that we get these wind farms connected to the grid and then we can take these modeled lines and then do a further strategic environmental impact assessment and and then be able to actually estimate the amount of different types of habitat impacted from transmission planning and then finally with those footprints as I mentioned earlier we can calculate the amount of land area impacted this is an example of agricultural lands and rangelands impacted across some of these scenarios without going into detail basically the differences in color the darker the color the the dark color indicates land areas impacted and so with if you just look at the agricultural lands across these three scenarios you can see that for solar which is in orange the dark orange bars are those areas that overlap with agricultural land for solar technologies and we can see that across all of the scenarios but predominantly in the in-state and the part west scenarios about one third to actually one half of all solar capacity is located on agricultural lands which has implications for the way that we manage those agricultural lands and or we should be anticipating that those will go out of production and we'll use primary use primarily for energy production um so with us this type of information we can then start to think about how we can do the reverse integration or the complementary integration which is integrating land energy into our land use planning knowing that these are the type of land uses that would be impacted and we're already seeing the need for this because even though we are really very much only on the cusp of this very large scale of of wind and solar technologies that we need for deep decarbonization these two headlines from Oregon and Washington from earlier last year suggest that as states are committing to climate goals food versus energy land conflicts are really already putting up roadblocks so we know that agriboltaics which is a combination of agriculture and PV has the potential to significantly increase land use efficiency and actually increase crop yields by providing shading for crops under warming climate conditions so it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive so this doesn't necessarily have to be conflict depending on how we think about the integration of energy in our landscapes and the potential for wind development on existing farmland in the Great Plains is truly vast and they provide really economic opportunities so 40% the photos from Iowa 40% of Iowa's electricity is from wind power currently and it's already brought in millions of dollars of tax revenue funding hospitals and schools so wind in the in these rural areas can actually help maintain their rural way of life okay so changing gears just a bit I don't as I mentioned earlier don't have much content yet for the ag and forestry and other land use sectors but I wanted to give you a glimpse of what I've been able to gather so far so this will be a much shorter section of the presentation what we know is that terrestrial carbon seeks are variable vulnerable and we see that in the US playing out so this is a figure of a study that looks at forest carbon sequestration historically and then projects out the business as usual and under various policy policy scenarios and almost in almost all scenarios we anticipate a reduction in the rate of carbon sequestration in our forest which is not something that we want to allow to or encourage unless we do some kind of perform some kind of intervention so we know that an intervention needs to be in place the question is what the extent of that intervention and the suite of management and policy strategies that need to be in place to ensure a continuous increase or at least a steady maintenance of forest carbon so this is another example of a more recent study that looks at sequestration over time in US forests but extends out beyond 2030 which is what the last study stopped at and the business as usual the base case does predict sort of this continuation of the status quo even out through 2100 with no management the very bottom line we can see actually declined in the sequestration rate so that is confirmed by the previous study and then there are there's this high demand for forest product scenario combined with management in which we could see much steadier growth in carbon sequestration so the way we manage our lands basically largely dictates the amount of carbon potential from US forests so in terms of frameworks that allow us to plan and and be able to come come up with the most optimal combination of management strategies to ensure carbon seeing continuation or growth this is a small handful of models that have been used for land use projections and they're called integrative assessment models the first is a US based model that's though global it was produced by US National Lab it's called GCAM the second and third are international models as well and they basically model the forestry and ad sector globally and attempt to understand the role of these sectors in future climate change mitigation strategies as both a sync and a source this is a figure from the US mid-century strategy report for deep decarbonization that was published in 2016 they used GCAM to do this the ag and forestry portion of the report and they looked at forest they looked at observed forest land trends though we are increasing the rate itself is decreasing and they use GCAM to project forest land area and that using that forest land area understand how much carbon sequestration we can anticipate for the over the next 20 or 30 years this these are so in terms of how useful these tools can be for actually spatial planning spatial explicit planning unfortunately most of these models are not very spatial explicit this is an example of the spatial resolution that's used in GCAM so the way that the market clears is in these ecological regions or the way that commodities are aggregated are in these azs as you can tell there are 18 of them they're very coarse just in the continuous us there are far fewer than 18 so this is not spatial explicit enough to be able to inform state level ag and forestry management so we look now at other possible frameworks that have been implemented or developed that at the state level that are much more spatial explicit this is the only one that I've come across so far so I welcome any other recommendations so California has created something called the Catland model which is the carbon natural and working lands carbon greenhouse gas model it was released in about a year ago um and it basically chooses uh the several suites of activities so this is these are the four main areas in which they've applied activities um in cultivated lands forest lands woodlands and wetlands and they um they've essentially chosen the degree to which they would extensively manage them um and in this in the figure below with the table we can see that the combination of all of these activities result in a certain number of million uh megatons of CO2 removed or or emitted um by 2030 or 2045 so by 2045 we start to see carbon gains actual carbon removed from the atmosphere so this is an example of a tool that California has adopted that is uh spatial explicit enough to to prescribe certain management strategies in certain parts of the of the state to derive quantifiable then greenhouse gas benefits okay so to quickly summarize um the key messages from the energy sector is that truly a low carbon transition is a land use transition the siding barriers that we're seeing are increasingly important challenges for both cost effective and rapid energy development um how we manage this transition real through some spatial planning framework can really make utilities hill renewable electricity a threat or an opportunity and finally the integration of land use into energy planning processes can really facilitate the local and regional spatial planning of renewable energy um that will be required to to truly scale up rapidly in terms of some recommendations um we need more interagency collaboration to produce these types of high resolution maps of environmental and social risks um government can facilitate regional or or uh state level zoning of large scale renewable energy development that helps streamline transmission and generation planning and this is particularly important for transmission planning because we'll need a lot of transmission as you can tell from those earlier slides um because where we lack the economic incentive for transmission build out we need to have policies that will that will drive it and some of the thorny elements of transmission build out especially in um interstate are really cost allocation who pays for it uh regional issues of where uh states can actually veto entirely veto lines um and then the what is the role for government so the government has typically in um in terms of the government in the form of FERC has actually established RTOs regional transmission operators that help to rule on these interstate transmission disputes so do we expand that role so that um fewer instances of vetoing can can stop long distance lines um and with that how I welcome any of your feedback and suggestions for improving this chapter um so I'm happy to um hear any scope suggestions for additional topics um especially if there are any other papers or models that haven't considered yet um and especially any other angles to include on the ag and forestry side um any met key messages and then finally thoughts on recommendations for policymakers and with that um copy to answer any questions or please contact me via email thank you thank you so much grace um I'll recommend that you flick it back to your first slide so we have your email on the screen and I'll open up the floor if there's anybody in the line that wants to ask any questions or has any feedback for grace at the moment it is the post holiday quiet um well thank you grace uh this topic is super interesting we're previously we're really dealing with these macro issues of r&d gaps and employment um it's really clear this is a super complicated and very regionally specific issue um thanks for all your work in the california case study and actually especially that slide that you put on looking at the integration of california versus california plus the west and what some of the benefits of looking at it from a regional perspective was really clear and so I really look forward to seeing how that this part of the chapter comes out and specifically the framework as well um I think building out a framework like that that we can then apply not just to this region of the us but you know nationally and across other areas is going to be hugely helpful for taking this forward um my only uh piece of feedback I guess would be I'd be really curious to look more at kind of the stakeholder mapping of how to take these things forward um this obviously takes a lot of different parts of society and government to understand you know to even just get the data and to input into these modeling so understanding who those players are um and how they all could work together might be helpful um but so that was the only part that I actually had noted down but otherwise thank you so much I really look forward to seeing how this chapter takes shape moving forward great thanks for that suggestion um yes and um yes thank you so much for the invitation to present great so Grace's email is on the screen there uh we'll also connect her with the notes uh following um so thank you Grace so much uh we will update everybody in the coming weeks on when they can expect the actual chapters to be released in draft form um and then we'll talk about the future of the project moving into the spring thank you everyone