(Clockwise, from top left: concentrated solar in red and wind; concentrated solar, wind and biomass in green; hydro in purple and geothermal; PVs and wave energy.)
It’s easy to spend a lot of time adding and removing layers from NREL’s RE Atlas tool. It’s easy to use, and provides a wealth of information. Recently, while using the RE Atlas we started looking at where the various RE resources intersected.
Why? Well, not so much for land-use questions (biomass and wind don’t really compete for land) but for investment. Yesterday’s post showed that the U.S. had a strong year for RE investment, but that different technologies fared better than others. So, we wanted to see which states had a diverse range of resources and which didn’t. Above, you see a few images of what we found.
One more thing that came to mind while using the RE Atlas, none of these places are that close to major urban areas on the east or west coasts. Which made us wonder, where are the transmission projects?
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