Biodiversity Impacts of Renewable Energy

Renewable energy is essential for mitigating climate change but can harm biodiversity through habitat loss. We combine spatial biodiversity data, satellite imagery, and asset-level information on 47,616 hydro, solar, and wind plants to construct a  measure of their biodiversity impacts. Solar plants have high aggregate impacts due to land use, while hydro plants are often sited in biodiversity-sensitive areas. Impacts are highly concentrated, skewed, and vary across plants by owner type (listed versus unlisted, financial versus non-financial) and financing structure (project versus corporate finance). Counterfactual analyses show that nearby siting alternatives could reduce impacts substantially without foregoing renewable energy investment.