UC Berkeley

Abstract

Renewable Energy Landscapes: Approaches to Modeling Change in the Electrical System and Predicting the Influence on Urban Development and Environmental Resources

by

Tessa Eve Beach

Doctor of Philosophy in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

University of California, Berkeley

Professor John D. Radke, Chair

Of the major infrastructure systems upon which society relies, energy systems have been some of the most influential yet under recognized drivers of urban development and environmental degradation. Both energy consumption and the proportion of the population living in urban areas are projected to increase substantially over the next half-century. At the same time, in the context of the serious climate change challenges facing society, the energy sector is entering a period of significant transition in primary energy sources, turning from fossil fuels to a variety of renewable and low-carbon resources. Such a transformation will require dramatic changes in the technologies and networks via which electrical power is produced and delivered. These changes can in turn be expected to propagate new patterns of environmental impact across the landscape—both through direct effects to natural resources as well as through influence on the location and form of future urban growth. These environmental effects have the potential to be as revolutionary as those that accompanied the transition to electrical power itself.

Despite these implications, the environmental effects of infrastructure transitions remain largely unexamined ex ante, and thus, the direct and indirect environmental implications of a low-carbon energy paradigm are still poorly defined. While decarbonizing the electric power sector necessitates a transition from the existing high-carbon system, a spatial spectrum of divergent potential low-carbon energy solutions is inherently feasible given that renewable resources such as solar and wind are at once both ubiquitous across the landscape and highly concentrated in specific areas. At one end of the spectrum, it is possible to construct large (utility-scale) renewable energy generators following the existing centralized electric power paradigm. At the other end, the potential exists for a fundamentally different structure involving small-scale, distributed renewable energy generators situated at or close to points of consumption. It is currently unclear what potential changes in the morphology of the electrical power system may occur as society increasingly transitions to generation from renewable resources, and what environmental and urban development consequences may result. The research presented in this dissertation collectively contributes innovative approaches to reducing this uncertainty before widespread energy infrastructure transitions occur. These approaches involve looking backwards to conceptualize the relationships between energy, environment, and urban development through time—then projecting forward with novel geospatial methods to forecast potential direct environmental resource impacts and indirect urban development effects of various future low-carbon energy system scenarios.

Throughout history, shifting spatial opportunities and constraints associated with past primary energy source and infrastructure system transitions have resulted in significant and varying patterns of direct environmental effects, as well as changing spatial locations and configurations of urban development. The impending transition to low-carbon energy resources can also be expected to induce such changes. In this work, the potential direct air pollution, water consumption, and land use conversion effects of six future regional energy system scenarios involving centralized and decentralized low-carbon generation sources are temporally and spatially projected. It is discovered that by 2030, carbon reduction scenarios generally confer co-benefits in terms of reduced regional water consumption and pollutant emissions relative to business as usual, but require significantly more land conversion. Furthermore, the magnitude of these effects within individual scenarios shows wide spatial variation across the region. Among the decarbonization scenarios themselves, the region-wide effects vary by as much as 108,000 annual tonnes of air pollution, 145x109 annual liters of water consumption, and 491,500 cumulative square-hectares of land conversion. Focusing on the indirect environmental effects of a transition, the impacts of a shift to distributed photovoltaic electricity generation on net energy consumption along Sacramento’s electrical grid are quantified and the resulting influence on patterns of future urban growth in the city is simulated. Relative to a base growth scenario, a scenario emphasizing distributed rooftop photovoltaic energy generation would have both locally concentrating and regionally dispersing influences on future urban growth and would favor diffuse single land use development. These results suggest that, in particular, there is a trend towards significant environmental consequences from additional future direct and indirect land use associated with a low-carbon energy transition—whether generation sources are implemented at largely centralized, decentralized, or a mix of scales.

Cumulatively, the research presented in this dissertation has significant implications for energy policymaking and the field of environmental planning. Because a transition to low-carbon energy systems presents fundamental choices regarding what resources and generation scales to target, it is critical to consider the ways in which urban development and environmental impacts may change in response to different future energy system scenarios. Understanding the potential for future energy scenarios to result in such effects is critical to making informed assessments of the energy pathways available to society and to avoiding unintended environmental consequences. Moreover, the infrastructure-urban development-environment relationships conceptualized and the approaches presented herein have the potential for widespread application beyond energy systems given that many of the critical infrastructures upon which society depends are networked systems. The ability to forecast change in infrastructure systems and predict impacts before they occur can and should move the practice of environmental planning towards energy-conscious, proactive intervention at local and regional scales in order to avoid unintended environmental consequences of energy infrastructure transitions and associated urban development.