How much space does one wind turbine take up?

Answer 1

One wind turbine consumes about 20 square meters of land at its base. There are sometimes gravel roads that lead to them from the nearest road, usually 2-3 meters wide and 10-50 meters long, to allow maintenance trucks to get to them. Calling it 120 square meters per wind turbine of actual land taken out of use isn't far off.

That's about a tenth of a hectare or a quarter of an acre. The rest of the land is still useful for whatever it was being used for before, whether that was farming, hiking, growing weeds, snowmobiling, grouse hunting or just sitting there unused.

As a wind turbine will generally bring in a lease value of $5000 - $8000 per year to the owner of the land, and as that is higher than most crops will yield per acre per year, it's an excellent additional revenue stream, especially for the multi-revenue stream, small-business owners we call farmers.

As wind turbines are spaced 6-10 blade diameters apart, a gigawatt of power generation would be spread over about about 518 square kilometres, or about 200 square miles. It would take up about 0.01% of that land. If it were all compressed together, it would be about the size of a nuclear plant.

There's a US land use requirements reference at the link referenced.