The Land Use Energy Connection

Abstract

To date, most planners have focused on the relationship between urban form and energy consumption. They argue that compact housing and urban patterns reduce both household and transportation energy use and should be promoted to combat a variety of ills, including import dependency and climate change. However, planners also have a strong role to play in energy production, particularly with the increasing adoption of renewable forms of energy. Planners will play an integral part in harmonizing local land use regulations and policies that will either promote or hinder the adoption of these technologies. In this article, we review industry and government reports, regulations, professional standards, news articles, and peer-reviewed literature in disparate fields. We identify pertinent environmental and land use planning issues of different types of centralized, distributed, conventional, and renewable energy generation, the implications and externalities of their fuel extraction, transportation, transmission and distribution, siting of generation facilities as well as the disposal of the waste. While the literature is voluminous, these issues have received scant attention in the planning literature. We make the case that land use and environmental planners should have a strong interest in energy.