From Chris Clarke of the National Parks Conservation Assn., about siting a commercial solar farm in the Mojave Desert just off Interstate 15:
We favor renewable energy but not here.
Roger that. After all, it's a "deceptively delicate and vital ecosystem rich in wildlife."
I'm being surly here, but it sure seems as if everyplace in the Mojave Desert is a delicate and vital ecosystem. Does anyone have a map of the areas that aren't delicate and vital? It would be handy to know beforehand.
"Does anyone have a map of the areas that aren't delicate and vital?"
Farmland isn't a bad place to start. Or brownfields. It's not crazy to suggest that, as we build out solar, maybe we shouldn't build it in wilderness.
.. the wilderness is the ideal place to build it.
No, it isn't. When you think "wilderness", you're probably imagining some blasted heath, a dead zone in which nothing can live. That's never the case.
Better to build facilities in or near inhabited areas, already served by roads and other civilized amenities. That way, it's easier to build and service the facility, and any property owners can receive rents, which can do quite a bit to diminish the NIMBYism, which will probably kill us all in the end, anyway.
Buying up cropland in the California central valley would be a good place to start as the current owners are continually complaining that "THEIR WATER" (from 200 miles away, behind dams they didn't pay for and delivered through channels they also didn't pay for which they pay a below market price ... but I digress) is being stolen from them and making it impossible to grow crops. You would think they would be thrilled to sell out and have the crops replaced by solar farms.
"Served by roads" like I-15?
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I believe the best starting point is anywhere Black Americans live. That's usually the solution to white NIMBYism.
This dovetails with the Ezra Klein piece in today's NYtimes (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construction-productivity-mystery.html ), which talks about how an explosion of interest groups with opposing interests (whether they be good or bad) are a big problem with any kind of construction project getting done in the US and many/most other industrialized countries. Of course the National Parks Conservation Society is gonna oppose develoment in a national park, it's pretty much their raison d'etre. But you get 10 or a 100 or 1000 different interest groups with a bone to pick with a project, it's gonna grind to a halt and cost a ton.
"...is gonna oppose develoment in a national park..."
It's not a national park. The national park is 100 miles north. The site is "half a mile north of the Mojave National Preserve." That's a big difference.
I drove by twice last weekend, to and from Vegas, and stopped up the road, in Baker, both ways. The highlight of Baker is a large parking lot offering EV charging, with dozens of hookups for Teslas, and dozens for non-Teslas. There's really nothing else in town. They could use some development.
I got a cheeseburger combo at the DQ for $16.15 and ate next to a triangle of a building that was missing half its roof.
“Really nothing else” in Baker? Don’t tell me they got rid of “The World’s Tallest Thermometer,” the first thing the comes to MY mind when I hear of Baker, CA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baker_California_Nov03.jpg
What is a solar farm supposed to do to the environment that will offend it's delicacy?
Throw shade on it.
Making it marginally easier to live there for things that can't survive utter desiccation seems certainly too delicate a consideration.
There are plenty of zoos where people will be enchanted to view a curated landscape of nothing going on.
The creatures which live in the desert have evolved to that. You might make an in for a penny argument that humans have already been modifying ecosystems, but that leaves open the prospect of geo engineering.
The creatures that live in the desert have evolved to tolerate desert conditions. Many of the animals have developed a habit, or instinct, to seek shade during the hotter parts of the day. If the solar panels are mounted far enough off the ground to allow the biggest animals in the local ecosystem to walk under them, they may well enhance the local environment by providing lots of shade and make it capable of supporting more animals.
I bet they'd do even better if we fed and watered them! We should start that, too--maybe with artificial streambeds and aquifer pumps, and drones that scatter food. Why, if we try hard enough, we could completely transform the ecosystem into something we internet commenters might think is way better than nature.
That's the point, right?
In the words of my favorite monarch "We are NOT amused".
Nature gets screwed any way you look at it.
The future won't be wilderness, at best it will be a planet sized Japanese garden.
Perhaps. But that's a reason to be careful, not cavalier, and generally try to avoid developing untouched (and ecologically delicate) land when there is already developed land that could serve.
It's also silly logic to assume the future will look like X, so it's ok if we destroy Y because there won't be any in the future anyway. Ex: Maybe the future won't be planets, at best it will be spun-up orbital habitats in a dyson swarm, so let's start pulverizing mountains now.
Building it will rip up the native cacti (all of which are endangered, everywhere). Better to put your solar arrays in a place that's already been de-naturalized, like a farm that can no longer get enough irrigation water to be productive. There will be lots and lots of those throughout the midwest in the coming years.
Southwest.
The roofs of our buildings would be one. Parking lots another.
The last time I visited my orthopedist the driveway, parking lots, parking garage, and medical buildings were all covered and topped with solar cells. I don't know if they power the building itself, or if they are part of a farm, but it seemed like a smart use of space. There are a lot of suburban parking lots that could house panels, and the covered parking provided by the solar panels is a nice side benefit!
Bingo! And this would enable vehicle charging while parked. Which would use the generated electricity on site, eliminating most losses due to long-distance transmission.
Also, providing luxurious covered parking. Win-win!
PG&E should go all in on roof top solar, residential, commercial and parking lots.
CA has begun putting solar panels over the thousands of miles of canals spanning the state. No one can complain about protecting canals, covering the canals reduces evaporation saving water, the canals are widely distributed reducing the effect of local clouding.
Some farms can actually benefit from sparse solar. Some plants do better in light shade than in full sun.
Instead, PG&E pushes-for and gets NEM3 tariffs.
Many cigar wrappers are made from tobacco that is shade-grown in the Connecticut River Valley. https://mshanken.imgix.net/cao/bolt/2019-08/connecticutshadetobaccotent-1600.jpg
Kevin, we’re you this unconcerned about “things desert” during the brouhaha over the desert tortoise?
Aren't there already a couple of solar farms in the Mojave Desert just off Interstate 15? Just over the border on the California side?
I have yet to see a serious analysis, or acknowledgement, of what we're going to do over the next decade when our clean energy goals run up against the twin walls of NIMBYism and environmental protection red tape. This goes for everything from siting solar and wind projects to lithium and other rare-earth metal mining for battery technology.
"I have yet to see"
You're on the internet--you can search for this stuff if you feel like it.
But I get your main point; building clean energy could be hard and involves resolving currently-unresolved issues. Given that the alternative is to cook the planet, I tend to think that moving forward with the clean energy goals, even accepting that there will be stumbles, is the only really viable path.
I get the impression that solid state batteries are making pretty good progress which should drop the demand for lithium eventually. What the actual time frame is I don't know.
Load up your maps app and search for parking.
Also all the interstates and highways where having solar panels covering all or part of them wouldn't be too much to maintain. There's no reason we can't put that space to better use.
Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't the greatest idea.
A square mile of solar panels would cost a whole lot less to install and maintain on a piece of land that is one mile square than on a long, narrow strip of land of equal area.
But they would be keeping the sun off my car.
At least the California PUC refused the big 3 electric utilities their cash grab of $8/KW/month of home owner owned grid connected solar so rooftop solar is still viable without the environmental disputes.
Cough. NEM3 tariff. Cough.
I might have been “ok” with reimbursing at wholesale if they allowed beyond net-zero, but they don’t , and there seems to be a requirement to “justify” the capacity one puts on one’s roof.
Ezra Klein had a podcast that showed what a fantasy renewables are:
https://www.mattball.org/2023/01/land-vs-renewable-fantasies.html
Ezra Klein did not have a podcast. Matt Ball did. Matt Ball is an animal rights activist who appears to believe there is no such thing as a nonsensitive area. He advocates for more nukes and extensive carbon capture.
While I'm not against either of those, pretending that nukes are less hazardous to wildlife than solar is beyond ridiculous. And no one has shown that carbon capture can be done at scale for any achievable amount of money.
I think we should deploy modern nuclear plant designs, but we should not fool ourselves about their impact. No matter how safe the plant, you still need a place to put the garbage. I think we should pour a lot of money into carbon capture research, but we should not pretend that it can be done at all in the near future. We should also not pretend that the carbon it captures is now safe. Better than 90% of carbon captured today is used for enhanced recovery of oil and natural gas. That means, at best, it does nothing for overall atmospheric carbon concentration. Those are oil exploration projects masked as environmental projects.
See . . . oh! The MIT professor who created the first attempt at a commercial carbon capture operation.
https://cee.mit.edu/every-dollar-spent-on-this-climate-technology-is-a-waste/
I think I trust them more, on this point, than some activist with a bee in his bonnet.
Not only disposal of nuclear waste, but there is an environmental cost to uranium mining and enrichment. I worked for a few years on nuclear-power contracts, I have no prejudice against it, it has a good safety record in the US, but it does not have a future. You may think the public has an unfounded fear of the technology, but good luck trying to change those attitudes.
Given that intermittents aren't up to the task, I guess humanity is hosed.
1) Not all sustainable sources are intermittent (hydro, geothermal, biomass, orbital solar);
2) Upgrading the grid reduces dependency on local conditions;
3) We haven't hit any ceiling in storage technologies. I'm interested to see how utility-scale iron-flow batteries now being installed perform, and how far costs can come down.
Sorry, should I have said given that hydroelectric is not up to the task 😉
We both know that the current state of the art is such that intermittents aren't up to the task (and have their own mining/refining issues) as well. Only nuclear can take up the slack. And anyone saying that global warming is an existential threat, but nuclear power is 'too expensive' (there's a line for the irony-challenged) is simply not being serious. Finally, I'm very familiar with this topic and know several people with much more experience with this than you, and to a (wo)man they flatly disagree with you about both the feasability of nuclear power and battery tech. So I repeat, if nuclear power is truly 'too expensive', then, since intermittents are most decidely _not_ up to the task, we are most decidedly hosed.
I never said nuclear was too expensive*, I said public opposition has doomed it. Of course it is technically feasible; we have a worldwide fleet of hundreds of units. It just isn't politically feasible to expand that fleet in democracies.
A second issue just occurred to me today: It is no longer acceptable to stifle economic development in the 'global South', and development requires energy. But it is in no one's interest to expand the nuclear club. We need energy solutions that don't open a path to WMD.
*It is too expensive, though. It may not be inherently costly, but the public opposition and consequent lawsuits and appeals and delays make it so. Shoreham on Long Island was under construction for over a decade, then faced local and state opposition for another five years or more before finally throwing in the towel. Originally estimated at $75 million, it ballooned to $6 billion. If your friends have a way to fix that, some very large companies would pay handsomely.
Oh really?
2021: "The Pew Research survey across the US population found a reversal of the last year's proportion − 50% supported nuclear power, while 47% opposed."[43]
2022: "In the USA in May 2022 a Gallup poll had nuclear support at 51% with 47% opposed."[50]
People are starting to get the notion that the anti-nuke types are scaremongering opportunists. More to the point, it seems like -- contrary to your assertion -- support for nuclear power dominates public opinion.
What else you got?
Forty-seven percent is plenty enough folks to bring lawsuits. Kevin did a column some time ago about majoritarianism in the US - stricter gun control, higher taxes for the rich, and other very popular policies have long been stymied by militant, vociferous minorities.
carbon capture is one of those things that, I think, is a monument to humanity's willingness to deceive itself.
CCS is at its heart an attempt to undo everything we just did by burning the fossil fuel in the first place. We run high-energy non-atmospheric carbon downhill into CO2 through combustion, getting useful* work out of the process. But then, we (a) somehow capture the CO2 and (b) push it back UPHILL into some stable non-atmospheric form and (c) store it somewhere. Since steps (a), (b), and (c) take a lot of energy and are just a reversal of what we did in the first place, good freaking luck beating thermodynamics on this one.
Now, of course, some will say "we don't have to turn the CO2 we got from burning coal all the way back into coal--we could turn it into something lower energy than coal, but less heat trapping/gaseous than CO2." Sure, maybe. But since each step is way less than 100% efficient, there ends up being very, very little slack to work with.
Some others will say "we don't have to turn the CO2 into anything--we can pump it into the ground, or use it for secondary oil production, or to make fizzy drinks!" Which of course is a fantasy (how many handy geologic formations to store carbon are there, keeping in mind that we'd need to store ~40 gigatons per year, not counting the additional CO2 produced by burning more fossil fuels to power the CCS machinery . . .) or bad faith (secondary oil production increases CO2 emissions, etc.).
_______
*Depending on one's definition.
Weathering works quite well when it comes to carbon capture. Not terribly sexy or high-tech though.
There's a parking lot next to a gas station in Baker that is NOT a delicate and vital ecosystem.
Good, people shouldn't want to surrender 300 square miles of nature to solar panels when Nuclear can produce the same energy with 1
Nobody has such a map because nobody would ever stop arguing over such a map.
"deceptively delicate and vital ecosystem rich in wildlife." See also "land considered sacred by tribe X"
BTW, can we have at least an acknowldgement that there are people out there who are working to make nuclear power as expensive as possible just so they can claim that nuclear power is too expensive to be feasible? It would add some credibility to the intermittents-only crowd if they would just fess up to this instead of pretending these people don't exist.
You don't see this on the other side, BTW, a nukes-only crowd that is constantly poor-mouthing intermittents. Everybody I know who is for nuclear power are also for wind, wave, solar, etc. They just don't think those are enough to close the gap.
Nothing pejorative about "the intermittents-only crowd", of course. As I noted above, there are sustainable sources that are not intermittent, and there are grid improvements and storage technologies that can help to bridge over periods of reduced availability.
What's perjorative about 'intermittents only'? Truly, I'd like to know. And no, you did not make an oberservation about grid improvements and storage technologies, you made a claim. Finally, would it kill you to admit that those non-intermittent sources cannot possiblly replace fossil fuel use? Googling you and this topic I see that more than one person has asked you to acknowledge what are, after all, very obvious points. I'm not going to respond any further until you stop your robotic responses. But I will note that a third party will see that I want to utilize every possible option, nuclear and 'renewables'. You, quite obviously refuse to consider one of these. Which one of us do you think this third party would consider as being butt-headed oppositional?
What's pejorative? It suggests (ridiculously) that there is a faction that opposes 24/7 availability of electricity, and/or that no system based on sustainable sources could provide continuous power.
Grid connections and storage are a reality; both need to be improved to have a workable system that depends on intermittent sources - that I suppose is a claim. It is primarily a technical problem, for which I have more hope of solution than the socio-political problem of opposition to nuclear. I myself do not "refuse to consider" nuclear; I strongly favor continued operation of existing plants until end-of-life. I am just pessimistic that any new plants could be built in currently-nuclear democratic nations of Europe, the US, or Asia. I actually find this unfortunate, as some of the new designs are clearly inherently safer. I oppose new plants for non-nuclear nations, as a nonproliferation measure.
Perhaps you have forgotten that I once worked on contracts for nuclear utilities ...?
[Robotic Response #4387A]
So calling solar and wind intermittent because they intermittent sources of energy because it sugguests that they are, in fact, intermittent and that you have to design around this is 'perjoritive'. Yes, indeed a canned robotic reply. From someone who thinks that engineering tech is easier than engineering public opinion, natch. Sigh. This fundamental lack of understanding about STEM stuff is one of the reasons we can't have good things.
Look at this chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263945/number-of-nuclear-power-plants-worldwide/
If 'engineering' public opinion was easy, don't you think the industry that could design nuclear steam supply systems, and was making billions of dollars from selling them, would have managed to do so?
That is not what I said and you know it. But since you need it spelled out for you, engineering a feature is often just not extremely difficult; it's impossible. Those batteries you need for your particular fetish to work? They may well fall into the latter category. At which point we've come full circle -- funny how that works, innit -- and I'll repeat my original observation, to whit, given that intermittents aren't up to the task, I guess humanity is hosed.
Just as there are multiple sustainable technologies for generation, there are multiple technologies for energy storage. My former home was near a 31MWe pumped-hydro reservoir that is over 90 years old; there are GWe-scale facilities in Wales and Switzerland. I don’t have any fetishes; we can afford to work on multiple technologies.