The availability of land for perennial energy crops in Great Britain

Abstract

This paper defines the potentially available land for perennial energy crops across Great Britain as the first component of a broader appraisal undertaken by the 'Spatial Modelling of Bioenergy in Great Britain to 2050' project. Combining data on seven primary constraints in a GIS reduced the available area to just over 9 M ha (40% of GB). Adding other restrictions based on land cover naturalness scores to represent landscape considerations resulted in a final area of 8.5 M ha (37% of GB). This distribution was compared with the locations of Miscanthus and SRC willow established under the English Energy Crop Scheme during 2001-2011 and it was found that 83% of the planting fell within the defined available land. Such a correspondence provides confidence that the factors considered in the analysis were broadly consistent with previous planting decisions. © 2013 The Authors.