Optimizing Land Use for Ecosystem Services and Solar Power in Michigan

Abstract

Consumers Energy has set a goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2040, including the deployment of nearly 8,000 megawatts of solar energy, which requires significant land use for ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) arrays. This project aims to explore sustainable ways to optimize solar farm land for both energy and ecosystem services. Specifically, the project objective is to develop a framework to analyze the costs and benefits of integrating dual-use land in Consumers Energy’s ground-mounted PV installations. This has been done by focusing on potential solar energy and ecosystem synergies and creating frameworks to evaluate these and future strategies that are of interest to Consumers Energy. In addition to evaluating dual-use land opportunities for a specific Consumers Energy solar farm, we extend this analysis for use in future sites. We generally find competing incentives when analyzing ecosystem services, policy, land area use, cost, and community implications of these dual-use land strategies, and suggest multi-criteria decision analysis with user-designated prioritization of decision criteria as a future pathway for co-optimization.