Meredith Fowlie
UC Berkeley and NBER (joint with Charles Taylor, Harvard and NBER)
Monday, November 17, 2025
4:10-5:10pm
241 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
“Land Conservation and the Clean Energy Transition: Evidence from U.S. Wind and Solar Development”
Abstract: Efficient renewable energy infrastructure deployment requires accounting for private costs and benefits as well as environmental externalities. We develop a model of site selection where potential locations vary in terms of revenue generation potential, private development costs, and conservation value. The welfare implications of land use protections depend critically on the correlation between these attributes: if the correlation between development costs and conservation value is weak, protections may substantially improve siting efficiency by internalizing externalities with minimal impacts on energy production costs. Using two decades of wind and solar interconnection records linked to geospatial attributes across the United States, we estimate a sequential model of developers’ site selection and interconnection decisions. We find that existing land protections—such as wetlands regulations and conservation easements—have significantly reduced entry into protected areas. Empirically, we estimate weak correlations between economic potential and assessed conservation value, suggesting that well-targeted land use protections can improve welfare. In ongoing work, we use our model to quantify the implicit costs of these restrictions and their implications for clean energy expansion.