Land occupation by solar power installations has become a rising concern that may cause adverse impacts on natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Existing studies mainly adopt a local perspective to view land use requirements of solar power and forget that the solar-based electricity system is subordinate to the macro economy and nourished by the material, machinery and service support by various economic sectors. To manifest a key aspect of the footprin. Land occupation by solar power installations has become a rising concern that may cause adverse impacts on natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Existing studies mainly adopt a local perspective to view land use requirements of solar power and forget that the solar-based electricity system is subordinate to the macro economy and nourished by the material, machinery and service support by various economic sectors. To manifest a key aspect of the footprint of solar power on land resources, this study uncovered the extensive industrial land use initiated by the infrastructure of a representative pilot solar-based electricity plant using a systems perspective. The results in this study show that in magnitude, land footprint by the infrastructure of the pilot solar plant amounts to three times as much as the onsite land area. Also, the land footprint calculated is revealed as one order of magnitude larger than a previous finding that includes primary materials only, and four to seven times higher than the onsite land use by coal-based electricity plants. The outcome implies that existing environmental management policies need to be re-evaluated by putting enough emphasis on the land displacement by solar power systems along the production chain.••Land footprintSolar-based electricityPlant infrastructureSystems perspectiveThe last decade bears a witness to the exponential growth of installed capacity in solar power on the globe. In 2017 alone, a whopping one third out of global incremental capacity in renewable-generating power is imputed to the expansion in solar installations (Jäger-Waldau, 2018). The burgeoning development of solar power gives rise to a booming interest within the academia in apprehending the ecological impacts that might come along in a wide spectrum from energy cost (Jacob et al., 2016; Ludin et al., 2018; Mahmud et al., 2020), environmental emissions (Akinyele et al., 2017; Li et al., 2019), water use (Whitaker et al., 2013; Wu and Chen, 2017) to land use (Bukhary et al., 2018; Turney and Fthenakis, 2011).For solar power, expanding the deployment of solar installations requires a great quantity of land resources available. Compared to traditional coal-fired power generation plants, solar-based electricity systems are generally more space-intensive for per unit electricity generated and have high dependence on geographic locations, partly because that much more diffuse forms of energy are to be tapped. The occupation of land by solar power deployment has intensified potential concerns in terms of counteracting the sustainability of natural ecosystems, aggravating biodiversity loss, and jeopardizing food security due to its competition with the land used to grow crops (Hernandez e. 2.1. Tiered hybrid methodGenerally, two methods are commonly applied for calculating the land footprint of renewable energy systems. Process analysis follows a bottom-up manner and offers detailed knowledge about the supply chain of a product or an energy production system, which makes it a possible means to figuring out the resource use requirements in the upstream processes (Jiang et al., 2018, 2020; Zhang et al., 2016c). Since the supply chain of any commodity is highly interwoven and directly or indirectly involves different products coming from almost all the economic industries, the process-analysis-based accounting suffers from the high level of data requirement and has to be terminated in several steps to make the calculations proceed. As a consequence, the accuracy of the results is often jeopardized by truncation errors (Bullard et al., 1978; Hendrickson et al., 1998).Compared with process-based analysis, systems IOA (systems input-output analysis) takes the shape of a top-down manner that could estimate the resources use or emissions induced along the production chain of typical goods or services produced by different economic sectors. Supported by the input-output account depicting the interdependent relations between different economic sectors within an economy, the systems IOA method introduces the thought of systems ecology (Odum, 1983) into the. 3.1. Land footprint of the infrastructure of the case systemAs witnessed in SI-A, the infrastructure of the case system induces a total amount of 445 thousand m2 of industrial land use. The contributions of different systems are illustrated in Fig. 3. The biggest contributor resides with turbo-generator system, accounting for around 30% of the total land footprint induced. The main reason is that turbo-generator system is responsible for the biggest share of the capital investment. Moreover, the industries involved for the manufacture of the turbo-generator, deaerator, power distribution unit and cables are intensive users of industrial land. Within the system of turbo generator, heat engine as the key component for steam electric generation takes the leading role, which occupies around one-eighth of the land footprint of the case system. Electric system ranks the second, accounting for about one-twelfth.3.2. Contributions of the economic sectors involved to the aggregate land footprintThe shares of the economic sectors involved to the aggregate land footprint of the case system are illustrated in Fig. 4. The abbreviations of associated indu.
