Integrating energy planning and land-use planning: taking stock and looking forward

The purpose of this section is to help municipalities shift land-use planning frameworks from a decelerator of renewable energy development to an accelerator of renewable energy development. By the end of this section, you should be able to:

One thing to keep in mind is that we focus here on renewable energy development strictly speaking. There are surely a huge range of opportunities to revise planning frameworks to support sustainable communities more holistically – e.g., active transit, local food, electric vehicles, urban forestry, and so on. But for the purpose of this work, our focus is on how planning frameworks can facilitate renewable energy generation and fuel switching.

Land-use planning est energy planning.

As our communities came to rely on imported fossil fuels, the area of land that was needed to provide energy services fell precipitously — e.g., wind-powered water-pumps were taken down; swaths of land once producing feed for draught animals was repurposed, and local woodlots served only a small fraction of heating requirements. At the same time, energy conversion infrastructure became highly centralized in large-scale power generation and fuel refining. Through historic zoning, these facilities, and their linear distribution infrastructure, were located out-of-sight for most of the local population. Our landscapes became increasingly detached from energy production activities. Settlement patterns evolved under the assumption that energy would be generated outside of settlement boundaries. As did our ideas about what a landscape should look like: i.e., we came to normalize a landscape as generally devoid of energy infrastructure.

Our increasing reliance on renewable energy — e.g., solar; wind; biomass — is reversing this trend. The transition to RE has re-introduced energy production into communities that had been detached from such activities over generations of fossil fuel production and consumption. With these new activities come trade-offs involving prevailing land-based economies and ecosystem services, for example in the ‘food vs. fuel debate’ surrounding biofuels and large-scale solar, and the issue of local habitat disruption in the case of wind turbines. These trade-offs are certainly not unique to renewables. What is different, rather, is that the trade-offs are being experienced across much wider geographic areas, and coming into confrontation with a much larger proportion of the population — no longer confined to specific fossil-fuel bearing regions and no longer occurring ‘out of sight, out of mind’. At the same time, distributed energy resources are forcing us to re-think urban areas as spaces of energy production, not only as spaces of energy consumption.

In other words, land use planning represents the ‘front lines’ of the transition to renewable energy. Over multiple generations, land-use planning frameworks have co-evolved with fossil fuels and have structured social and economic activities across our landscape in ways that maximize their use in society. Land-use planning frameworks represent the spatial manifestation of ‘carbon lock-in’; producing landscape patterns and social relations to land that privilege fossil fuels and inhibit effective low-carbon energy transition strategies from taking shape. As a corollary, land-use planning frameworks have not been designed to account for, or accommodate, the very different spatial properties of renewable energy systems. At the same time, land-use planning systems are not always prepared to manage the land-use trade-offs and landscape impacts that come with RE development. 

Framed in this way, we understand land-use planning as energy planning: i.e., as part of the problem and the solution in designing governance systems that work toward a renewable energy transition. Planning frameworks and instruments of planning institutionalize and codify dominant landscape values and act as levers of control on RE development and, in turn, shape processes of energy transition on the ground; e.g., in terms of determining which locations are deemed ‘acceptable’ or not for particular kinds of RE infrastructure. In this regard, the City of Kingston has framed the role of land-use planning very well:

As a result of technological advances and energy deregulation, various forms of renewable energy are now able to provide thermal and electrical power on a site-specific basis, district basis, or as part of a more expansive utility grid system. The social, economic and environmental benefits of using renewable energy technologies in developments are well-documented. Still, these merits must be balanced with assuring the functionality of the technology, and its compatibility with the natural environment and surrounding land uses.

City of Kingston, Official Plan

Clicking on the links below will take you to data sets that contain verbatim examples of how renewable energy has been incorporated into municipal planning policies within that region. For the purposes of this project, we have gathered data from the three regions represented by our municipal partners: Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Although regulatory conditions vary across provinces, these data should provide examples and insights from which municipal sustainability practitioners can improve the integration of land-use planning and energy planning in their own jurisdiction.

To compile these data, we undertook a structured content analysis of land-use planning policy documents that are publicly available online. We searched for explicit references to renewable energy and then copied each reference into a table. If the table is left blank for a particular municipality, it means we could not find an explicit reference to renewable energy in the respective planning document, or we could not find a publicly available document. Where appropriate, the data are broken out according to administratively -defined categories of local government within each region – e.g., single tier vs. upper-tier in the case of Ontario, rural communities vs. towns vs. cities in the case of New Brunswick. A simple search based on a keyword (ctrl+f) will return excerpts verbatim that may be useful to best fit your need (e.g., to search for how district energy, specifically, has been addressed). In terms of our own analysis, we summarize key takeaways and general lessons learned to provide general insights that can guide your efforts in your own community.