The availability of land for perennial energy crops in Great Britain

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 9Mha (40% of GB). Adding other restrictions based on land cover naturalness scores to represent landscape considerations resulted in a final area of 8.5Mha (37% of GB). This distribution was compared with the locations ofMiscanthusand SRC willow established under the English Energy Crop Scheme during 20012011 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.