Are these lands pre-cleared for building, no additional environmental review? Can they also pre-clear transmission corridors to connect these solar panels to the grid, no additional environmental review and a promise to exercise imminent domain?
Load centers aren't too far, and transmission is reasonably close. You can build transmission in parallel to generation facilities, versus serial order of operations.
> The updated roadmap... focuses on lands within 10 miles of existing or planned transmission lines and moves away from lands with sensitive resources.
That is nice, but we all know that does nothing to stop a decade or more of lawsuits. The Government could preempt all those lawsuits now by pre-clearing the areas so they can start building as soon as possible.
They probably couldn't feasibly pre-clear this amount of land even if they wanted to. There are almost certainly resources (e.g. human remains and cultural sites) somewhere in that area that not only does the BLM not have authority over, but for which the existing legislation is basically Congress saying "Not within in our authority".
Being able to challenge the construction of transmission lines is a good thing, not a bad thing. The largest unfragmented forest east of the Mississippi was just carved in half by a new transmission line in Maine, when there were alternative options that would not have done so. It just so happened that the most environmentally harmful option was nevertheless the most profitable, so they rammed it through.
And while I don't like the outcome, I like that we had the ability to challenge it. An under-appreciated aspect of corridor construction has been utilities being able to use state level regulatory capture to ram through projects that contribute to forest fragmentation.
Being able to challenge these for legitimate purposes has to be balanced against the equally legitimate problem of NIMBY obstructionism of corridor construction. But my feeling is that utilities aren't interested in a balance, they are interested pushing the NIMBY narrative to achieve a complete blank checks to circumvent environmental reviews altogether.
I don't want to ram through anything and everything, but why not have the BLM conduct studies now? They can pick the most promising, lowest environment footprint corridors. If a pre-approved corridor works, use it, if not go through the normal process.
> Edge effects are even more complicated. They alter growing conditions within the interior of forests through drastic changes in temperature, moisture, light, and wind. Put simply, the environment of the adjacent non-forest land determines the environment of the forest fragment, particularly on its edges. This triggers a cascade of ill effects on the health, growth, and survivability of trees, flowers, ferns, and lichens and an array of secondary effects on the animals that depend on them. Ecologists suggest that true interior forest conditions – you know, where it’s hard to hear cars and lawnmowers and it remains cool, shady, and downright damp even during a three-week drought – only occur at least 200-300 feet inside the non-forest edge.
> And so a circular forest island in a sea of non-forest would have to be more than 14 acres in size to include just one acre of such interior forest condition. Put differently, reports indicate that the negative habitat effects of each residential building pocket within a forest radiate outward, affecting up to 30 additional acres with increased disturbance, predation, and competition from edge-dwellers. This may not matter to generalist species like deer, raccoons, and blue jays, which may actually benefit from fragmentation, but it is hell on interior-dependent species like salamanders, goshawks, bats, and flying squirrels. The smaller the remnant the greater the influence of external factors and edge effects. A wise person once likened it to ice cubes: the smaller ones melt faster.
> The largest unfragmented forest east of the Mississippi was just carved in half by a new transmission line
Is this a big problem? Construction, sure, messy, but once it’s up it’s not really a big deal? Or is there something I am missing? It’s not like they put in a divided highway with animal-killing traffic. The vast majority of the time, it’s just going to be a long, linear clearing. Nobody there, minimal noise.
How realistic is it to build and maintain these in a desert? When discussing doing this in the Sahara, there were lots of people claiming that the sand would make maintaining them costly and that at large scales them blocking the sun can actually effect the local climate as it cools the ground and allows rainwater to pool.
They definitely do affect the local climate, and at a very large scale they can hypothetically change the albedo of the desert enough to affect global weather and climate patterns.
Maybe? Apparently if we blanket the Sahara with solar it could actually increase cloud cover and reduce solar potential in a lot of the rest of the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01117-5.
I guess my answer is no, it would literally cause the climate to change so by definition that's not mitigating climate change. It would be a form of geoengineering, which is sort of its own category separate from mitigation, which refers to action that reduces change.
Deserts in the US are not the Sahara - they are large, flat open spaces of hard ground and sagebrush. I'm sure there are still challenges, but if you are envisioning sand dunes to all horizons, that isn't what our deserts look like.
One other issue with the Sahara is that you still have to transport that energy to where it will be used. It's been difficult already to build transmission within the US between a few states. Crossing the Mediterranean and getting the energy across southern Europe (which is sunny and doesn't need it) to cloudier northern Europe would be a lot of permitting. If they can convert the Sahara electricity to liquid fuels, it might actually fit with trade patterns better.
Spain and Morocco are already in the process of building a big solar array in Morocco and a third link across the Strait of Gibraltar (400 kV AC, 700 MW).
"Europe’s electricity system currently has more than 400 interconnectors and is the world’s largest interconnected grid. Currently Europe has around 93 GW of cross-border transmission capacity with a further 23 GW in construction/advanced permitting by 2025"
makes a lot of sense in the Southwest where the land can't be used productively for much else. They should create some programs to incentivize some of the farmers in California and other states to put up solar on their land so they stop consuming so much water as well
>to incentivize some of the farmers in California and other states to put up solar on their land
agriculture production - ballpark of 4000-10000kg per acre sold at $1/kg, 2 harvests/year, i.e. $8000-$20000. Solar per acre - 300 days, 10 hours/day, 200Wt/m2, $0.04/KWh - $160/day at 50% coverage, ie. $50K/year.
In general - the plants efficiency is less than 5%, ie. at least 4x less than that of solar panels, and at the end everything is about energy (and information as both are opposite of entropy (ie. life and technology is about decreasing of entropy in the local neighborhood by shifting/exporting it out of the neighborhood into the wider environment))
California is the largest ag producer in this country by far. I do wonder to what degree solar panels on fields could even help this stat by creating more varied environments that different crops could flourish in. That's not even touching on the reduced water consumption that partial shade from solar panels could bring about. Even if water consumption remained the same and the extra water was diverted to other types of crops it could improve overall output from the state.
Gotta be honest: I won’t comprehend areas this large regardless of which unit system is used lol. Maybe I should invent a digestible unit that I’m familiar with, like “# of Denver metro areas” or something!
That is significantly more land than the USA would need to power the entire USA with solar power. Why so much land? (That is 34k miles^2 when we would only need 22k at most, new solar generations could potentially get that amount down to 10k).
The article says we would need 700k, but clearly the idea is that 22m acres of land are permitted to have solar, not that 22m acres of land will all have solar deployed. As the article says, this gives maximum flexibility.
For example 700k acres in one spot would not be ideal as transmission losses to other regions would be significant, so we need more possible space to allow distributed production.
On paper, 22M acres is enough room for 1.78 TW annualised over a year[0], which is about 61% of current global electricity demand.
I doubt they'll get close to filling this land up with PV, but perhaps at least making this much available will reduce the rate at which people ask how much land PV needs to take up.
"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.
However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."
(solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn)
Bunch of farmers woke me up at 04:25 this morning with a drive-slow horn-honking parade past my apartment.
If I understand right, this protest was in part due to an attempt by the (German) government to reduce the level at which farmers are being subsidised.
Reason I bring this up, is that I have heard that the US only started using corn ethanol as an excuse to keep subsidising farmers, not because it was ever a good idea.
You see similar things in California, billboards posted by farmers wailing about the state government raising water prices, when they are the ones subsidizing (to the nth degree) agricultural water to begin with.
I can absolutely believe that the Federal government did it for that reason, but I think it was my own State (California) that gave them the political cover because our dumbasses thought it was a genuinely good idea 20 years ago and we mandated ethanol in gasoline first (California has corn farms, but we are not a big corn-growing State so much as a big almost-everything-else-growing State).
Ethanol is better than what it replaced, MTBE, hence California’s mandate. The problem was when the ag lobby started advocating for ethanol blends in excess of what is necessary to capture more subsidies.
Govts can continue to subsidies farmers, harvest sunlight with solar panels and and get paid. Its a lot better than harvesting sunlight with plants, instead of farming 2 times/year, a solar panel will produce for 25+ years.
Well - they have "no more money" for tax-break, but they have the money to double the War budget for Ukraine from €4 billion to €8 billion. I can understand why the German farmers are unhappy.
I answered elsewhere corn chips and corn tortillas only (excluding supermarket tortillas anyway, those suck too). I’m not immune to tacos, enchiladas or guacamole and salsa delivery mechanisms.
There is however a special place in hell for the first person to come up with cornbread and serve it to another human being. No redeemable qualities. I’m not even sure if I would call it bread or food for that matter.
Dent corn is perfectly edible. The white variety is used in cornmeal, corn chips, and tortillas. Yellow is more used for animal feed and industrial use. But it is edible since it is pure starch.
Also, except for emergencies, the corn wouldn't be diverted but the farmers would plant a different variety or different crop the next year.
Animals and people. Starch and oil are starch and oil. It's just common dent corn. There are varieties that lend themselves to biofuels and plastics, but they're still starch and oil at their base.
have you ever had corn that was not intended to be sold as food to humans? it's not good. if that's the only corn you've ever had, then i could see why one might not like corn. i imagine the situation where the first time they are give "good" corn, the clouds part, the ray of light hits them as the chorus of angels rings out. it's that different.
well, i'm replying directly to "that corn can be diverted from fuel to food" which sounds like you're walking back from a bit. if you want corn to not be food, you have to make that decision early. you can always let the food corn become other use, but not the other way around.
there are also other crops that are better suited for starch/oil. so ultimately, to me, any use of corn other than food is basically just finding a way to subsidize the farmers. i'm not opposed to that, but if we're paying for it anyways, why not grow something better suited for purpose rather than just shoehorning corn as the solution?
To me, it seemed they were consistently saying the equivalent of:
If there is a year where nationwide farm output is, due to bad luck, significantly below average, we can take the crops that were going to make biofuel and use them to make cooking oil.
(IIRC farm output is always somewhat irregular, so this is a fairly plausible scenario).
If that's what's being defended against, it doesn't matter so much if it's a bit meh, it matters that you'd convinced farmers to plant the crops before they knew they'd be eaten. A government can also pay for overproduction of normal crops, but might want to reduce the cost of that by asking for a dual use crop.
I'm still not convinced doing this with corn is good, but it's at least the start of an argument that might convince me.
You're mistaken. Just across the board. I'm not walking anything back. I have said the same thing every time.
Food =/= just eat the corn as is. It's an ingredient in many many many foods. That's what I'm talking about. Starch. Oil.
And no, sweet corn (food corn for humans) is not appropriate to be used as field corn for biofuel. Too high of moisture content, even when dried. It just doesn't store well.
Finally - Per acre, you will be hard pressed to find a crop that can create as many products, including starch and oil, as corn. Please let me know what you're talking about here.
I agree 100% that corn is a very inefficient fuel source, but
> If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States
Isn't really accurate. It could never provide that, simply because solar is too intermittent. With (theoretically huuuuuge batteries) it could perhaps, but those don't exist. So it couldn't.
To be honest while 40GWh a year is a huge quantity of batteries it's not nearly enough for a country that consume 11TWh a day, maybe in a century (and ignoring battery degradation). US needs at least a magnitude more to reach the objective in a few decades.
Arguing that we can't solve problem X by growing tech Y, because that would require support from tech Z which would also need to grow, seems like putting the conclusion first and trying to find arguments to fit.
So people get rich making battery factories. So what?
The problem with solar is that we will have destroyed the environment to create those solar panels. The return on energy invested (RoEI) on solar is less than 10x which, when you're dealing with an energy budget like climate change etc, makes it a non-solution. Nuclear RoEI is more like 100x
From Wikipedia: "A 2015 review in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews assessed the energy payback time and EROI of a variety of PV module technologies. In this study, which uses an insolation of 1700 kWh/m2/yr and a system lifetime of 30 years, mean harmonized EROIs between 8.7 and 34.2 were found." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
Seems like the lower numbers come from older, obsolete PV technologies. Lots of improvement since even 2015.
At the area of land we're talking about (and the location of the land), dust (or cleaning), abrasive sand, lightning and hail are all going to be an issue for the panel lifetimes, if not their efficiency.
They're mostly not in areas with tornadoes, which is nice, but I think 30 years is pretty optimistic.
Yeah, it's too bad that we make our decisions based on emotion, a problem affecting the "eco" side as well as the "right wing reactionary" side.
The "eco" side pushes solar and wind for everything and thinks nuclear plants inevitably explode. The "right wing" side pushes coal exclusively because it's sad that the few thousand coal miners left could lose their jobs.
The "eco" side aren't the ones making decisions about nuclear power investment. That would be the for-profit energy companies. Maybe think a little more about why an executive whose purpose is to generate profit doesn't want to invest *billions* of dollars and *over a decade* of construction time at a minimum and would rather put money into a wind turbine that turns a profit in under a year. The economics of nuclear power makes absolutely no sense. Literally every study into the subject confirms this. If you really want substantial nuclear power, you've got to take capitalism out of the equation. Nationalize the energy sector and remove representative democracy then you can build nuke plants like China.
Nuclear power plants and coal power plants fundamentally work the same way. Generate heat, make steam, spin turbines, make electricity.
Nuclear power plants without passive safety features need extra redundancy on the cooling systems, e.g. you need backup generators. There is no way that should add billions of dollars to the price of the plant.
They cost billions of dollars more because competitors (primarily coal and natural gas) lobby for rules that make them cost more on purpose, because they don't want to compete with a technology that should have a similar construction cost and negligible fuel cost. Especially when they're the suppliers of the fuel.
Fortunately for them nuclear is scary and then you can lobby not just for safety measures that make sense but also for ones with poor cost benefit ratios that only serve to make the plants uneconomically expensive. Then the coal companies shrug and say the market has decided.
EROEI is only a problem if we're expecting it to get below 1 (or close enough given all the other systematic losses at the time), which I vaguely remember being one of the concerns with peak oil.
Solar can supply about ten times our current needs with 1% of the surface of the Earth, a completely circular system where PV today makes PV tomorrow only has recurring costs of (1/(EROEI+1)) of the total output — x10 EROEI becomes 9% of the lifetime output of a cell being used to make the next cell.
This is really not true in natural Southwestern US desert, because the worst thing you can do is trample the biotic crust, which takes years (even decades) to regenerate. It is an established biosystem, with its own birds and insects and arthropods and mammals. Trucks driving on it and earth movers leveling it will do nothing good. TBH I’d rather see us put panels on existing buildings before we trample some of the last undeveloped space in North America.
False. After having done a cost analysis of the increase in accidents in the parking lots due to the increased poles, the cheap cost of power from the grid in my area of the country, and the fact that I must hire a veteran owned firm if they are slightly less than 33.33% more expensive than private firms (aka they take the job and pocket 33.32% and subcontract out to their bidding competitors).
Solar is not coming to a government parking lot near you unless these hurdles are addressed. In the very least, not "all" government parkinglots.
Every school in my town recently got massive solar in the parking lots. So it's definitely happening some places.
It actually annoyed me a bit because my childhood elementary school is in my neighborhood of houses. And they constructed large metal structures in the parking lot and installed the solar. It's basically massive metal commercial metalwork, in a residential neighborhood. A bit weird.
Correct, a residential neighborhood is used to having cars in it.
What it usually doesn't have is 6x6" metal columns going up 20' into the air, and then diagonal metal roofing with solar panels on it.
Go ahead and try to get a permit to install a metal carport in front of your house in a normal town. I don't think you'll get it because it looks ridiculous in residential. But somehow they okd industrial metal solar installations in my neighborhood.
I guess buying a house next to one is one thing. Permitting one after people bought a house is a bit different.
And a substation might be required, so I guess bring it on. Solar panels in a parking lot could be done anywhere. Why install them in the parking lot in a quaint residential neighborhood? Why not just put them near city hall or any land the city owns but isn't in residential?
I get it, but I don't think it was really necessary or any more useful than solar on tons of other locations. The city is going to pay for x amount of electricity one way or another. They could have stick that solar in the bus terminal parking lot in the commercial side of town.
Probably dramatically less, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. You can be opportunistic with locating solar panels, siting them on land and surfaces that are not otherwise usable. So it's not necessarily in "competition" with other energy/infrastructure/etc projects when it comes to land usage.
Is there a present moment costs/pros-cons matrix updated by trustworthy organizations to compare and contrast options, e.g. current cost per kw of each technology, alternative use of lands/opportunity costs for those lands, etc?
Other Pros / Cons
I’m not going to link any sources for these. Things like the cost of local pollution, climate change, geo politics of where the energy/equipment comes from, etc all become quite controversial depending on one’s political leanings.
The above links are all US centric. And because of that it’s worth pointing out that the only metric that matters in the US is return on investment. With that in mind, solar, wind, and batteries are dominating all new installations in the US. For US specific information, both EIA.gov and FERC.gov are treasure troves of information.
Lastly, since you’ve mentioned land use specifically, it’s important to note that different countries have different priorities. South Korea and the US will look at land use very differently. For all practical purposes, the US has infinite land, so land use is largely irrelevant.
I think there is a very strong argument that the effects on the local ecosystems and habitat from putting down solar energy is significantly less than the effects that will occur from climate change. This is a straw man argument and I'm pretty tired of seeing it (similar vein - "wind turbines kill birds", yeah but not as much as climate change will!)
My comment isn't a logical fallacy. It's lazy of you to throw that out there, and it doesn't automatically debunk what you're responding to. Plus, I just asked a question.
My comment comes from a place of pointing out a chain of events of engineering causing problems, then engineering solving those problems while creating new problems. Of course, if you just dismiss that plants and animals live there in the desert, then you don't need to think about them. But if you don't dismiss them but still need the solar power at all costs, then maybe studies could be commissioned that provide the ecosystem the best change for unintended negative change if the solar panels absolutely must be built.
And let's not act like these solar panels will have much to do, if anything, with helping to mitigate climate change.
As the impact statement notes, there is already 9 gigawatts of solar deployed on BLM lands that we can study and learn from, to make sure the benefits outweigh the consequences.
I have long thought there must be a reason why vast, empty plots of sun drenched land were not covered in solar panels. Half of Nevada could become the nation's power plant.
The US has very little desert in the Sahara or Saudi Arabia style of nothing but sand and rocks. Most desert areas in the US are covered in cactus, brush, and grasses.
One acre can produce 250 - 300 kwhrs of electricity, enough for 10 houses. 22 million acres would mean it could produce enough power for every home in the US.
Where do you think that power should be coming from to stop the cactus, brush and grasses from getting more shade?
Mostly nuclear fission and hopefully fusion in the future, but one does have to worry about heating up the earth directly with these methods in the very long term. Using solar and wind only does prevent that problem.
It's a desert. There's arguably less biodiversity there than most places. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for there to still be plenty of cactuses and jackrabbits AND a massive amount of solar panels.
Rooftop and parking lot solar isn't the same thing. It's not automatically better. The efficiency of rooftop solar isn't nearly as good as an array that can follow the sun. Given finite resources you could make a case we're better off deploying those panels in a desert and connecting a big fat cable to them vs. a million houses all paying individual installers to install tiny, inefficient arrays piecemeal.
The desert is teeming with life under the crust, and panels can disturb or destroy that. We've learned the hard way to not just rush in thinking we know what's best for the land, since we've destroyed so much already.
I thought it was well established that desert panels have to be cleaned constantly, and use huge amounts of water; without data im assuming that'll cost more than whatever efficiency gain you get from tracking panels verses non.
And parking lots just make sense -- lots store heat, cars get blistering, and solar gives power and shade...its a win win all day.
But climate change will disturb all ecosystems. If solar panels help mitigate, I think it’s a small price to pay at the risk of messing with desert ecosystems.
Which parts of these 22 million acres are "our irreplaceable natural heritage" ?
What specifically do you think solar panels will even hurt and why?
"Under the current policy, there are at least 80 million acres of federal lands open to oil and gas development, which is 100 times the amount of public land available for solar."
I have high hopes that we can provide enough energy by using already disturbed land
Based on what?
This is enough land to power every house in the US with solar if it was all used. It's interesting that even though crops are grown under solar panels all the time, you are worried about empty unused land and not the land already being used for oil and gas or the fact that 60% of all electricity still comes from fossil fuels in the US.
Sun trackers are not free, and nowadays it's cheaper to offset the losses of a rooftop with more panels than to buy a tracker.
Also dessert is not particularly good for panels. A panel could reach 70-80°C in such environment, when its optimal is at 25°C. Will lose around 25% efficiency.
Wonder if solar at high scale can itself change the climate and other geological or astronomical parameters (not getting the right word immediately here, what I mean is, what effects does it have on the earth's climate and on the universe)?
As in, what is the effect of beaming out all that reflected solar energy into space, from the solar panels? (Assuming here that the tech still uses photovoltaic panels). Any negatives?
This is actually just a small fraction of federal lands; about 3.4% of the 640 million federally owned acres.
Most of what is today the United States was at one point or another purchased by the federal government, either willingly or forcefully, from its prior owner.
Leaving in Maryland when I drive to the eastern shore and see farm lands cover in solar panels I am some what upset by this… would it not make better sense to just reduce the cost or in some way incentivize roof top solar for commercial buildings? Flying into dca I see hundreds of huge warehouses with flat roofs and just think they would be perfect for solar… but farm lands… if they aren’t needed for food then restore them to forests?
Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis.
Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground.
I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.
> Photovoltaics are substantially more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than photosynthesis.
Humans can't eat electricity though.
> Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation
This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
Rooftops are terrible places to put solar because they're on roofs. They require support, it increases maintainance costs for both the roof and the solar, and you need to have a bunch of infrustructure coexist with everything else the building is doing. Putting your panels on some dirt somewhere just requires some open dirt, of which we have a lot.
Roofs are commonly in direct sunlight and empty. The surface is otherwise-wasted space which isn't good for much else.
Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc.
Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission.
The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. It might be hard to intuit this is you spend most of your life in a city but the vast majority of land is unused, and a great deal of it is not terribly ecologically important. The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
> Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it.
We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US.
> The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do.
Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves.
And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
No, roofs are the optimal place for solar because roofs are almost entirely wasted square footage (with the exception of the occasional antenna or exhaust vent). It is unused space that won't ever be used for anything, so filling all roofs with solar is ideal. As a bonus, they shade the actual roof.
Open space ("dirt") is potentially useful for tons of other uses, no point in wasting it on panels that can go on the roof.
We as a species are surely not short on open space. "Wasting it" in this case means the cheapest possible utility-scale solar energy installations, which is what we need to not just displace all fossil fuel usage but lead to a future of energy abundance rather than shortage.
> We as a species are surely not short on open space.
There is a lot of unused open space way out far from cities. Electricity suffers from transmission losses, the more distance the more loss.
The ideal place to put that panel is on my roof which is just a few dozen feet from where it's going to be consumed. That'll be a lot more efficient than having it 500 miles away in the desert.
A lot? Try a few percent. That's what bad transmission costs. Compare that to the additional costs in actual dollars and cents of multiplying your install costs by the number of installs required to achieve the required mwh. Its not even close.
You're confusing the line item called "transmission" with the concept that the electric utility's entire operations expense is in service of operating the power grid and all of that gets included in the price per kWh whenever you buy power through the grid.
A property owner who is installing their own solar and consuming the output themselves can avoid the other 56% of those costs. Which is well worth a one-time labor cost.
In the real world, farm power is required for heavy equipment, battery banks, powering cell phone repeating towers on leased out land and entire paddocks are dedicated to mounting panels.
These can be ground panels (saves on mounting) or high mounts (to allow for tilt and track | animals to graze underneath)
Sunlight is already energy. Surely you mean something to do with energy conversion?
It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals.
What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
What? How is the land getting “salted”? The small trace amounts of metals in the solar panels stay inside the solar panels. They don’t melt into the soil. And you just take the panels away when they reach EOL.
There are certainly not "small trace amounts" of heavy metals in solar panels. If they sit there for 100 years, the heavy metals will not stay put.
Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away".
Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
Malls/supermarkets in the US have relatively large parking spaces, why not cover them with solar panels first before taking over agricultural land? It would be more expensive than putting panels in an open field but should not be (much) more expensive than rooftop solar. It would allow to kill two birds with one stone - cars will be heated less under the canopy of solar panels.
I don't know what the actual economics of farm deployments are, but something that might be interesting to consider is that farming has basically been a giant exercise of risk management and hedging for roughly forever. Once upon a time, a farmer might have satisfied some degree of hedging through crop diversity, however modern systems and economics have heavily incentivized massive scale mono-culture.
Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might.
Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.
They shouldn't have put it on the building, but rather constructed large shaded areas over parking. It would have helped to reduce the urban heat island effect that you get form miles and miles of pavement.
I don't know to what extent this is accurate, but the middle area of Georgia has become blanketed in solar panels. Apparently it's a very ideal area for production and mostly on former farm land, but huge swaths miles and miles have recently popped up thanks to incentives. That I know is accurate, what's below I've only seen from random sources and can't independently verify.
All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels.
But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated.
They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.
I'm not a fan this type of solar development. I live in Arizona and we've bulldozed plenty of the desert. There's lots of life and beauty worth preserving. Instead let's put solar panels on the huge, hot, mostly empty parking lots we're forced to have in the city. It is more expensive, but it can reuse some underutilized space and add some shade within the city. Or put it over agriculture on more rooftops or other similar spaces.
That is not a realistic proposition. Besides the ridiculous VATs on the masts the angles are all wrong and the wind loading is going to destroy structures like that during the first real storm.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadRoads are also generally worse for the environment than transmission lines.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152
https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/all-energy-infrastructure-and-res...
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/fedmaps::u-s-electric-power-...
> The updated roadmap... focuses on lands within 10 miles of existing or planned transmission lines and moves away from lands with sensitive resources.
And while I don't like the outcome, I like that we had the ability to challenge it. An under-appreciated aspect of corridor construction has been utilities being able to use state level regulatory capture to ram through projects that contribute to forest fragmentation.
Being able to challenge these for legitimate purposes has to be balanced against the equally legitimate problem of NIMBY obstructionism of corridor construction. But my feeling is that utilities aren't interested in a balance, they are interested pushing the NIMBY narrative to achieve a complete blank checks to circumvent environmental reviews altogether.
> Edge effects are even more complicated. They alter growing conditions within the interior of forests through drastic changes in temperature, moisture, light, and wind. Put simply, the environment of the adjacent non-forest land determines the environment of the forest fragment, particularly on its edges. This triggers a cascade of ill effects on the health, growth, and survivability of trees, flowers, ferns, and lichens and an array of secondary effects on the animals that depend on them. Ecologists suggest that true interior forest conditions – you know, where it’s hard to hear cars and lawnmowers and it remains cool, shady, and downright damp even during a three-week drought – only occur at least 200-300 feet inside the non-forest edge.
> And so a circular forest island in a sea of non-forest would have to be more than 14 acres in size to include just one acre of such interior forest condition. Put differently, reports indicate that the negative habitat effects of each residential building pocket within a forest radiate outward, affecting up to 30 additional acres with increased disturbance, predation, and competition from edge-dwellers. This may not matter to generalist species like deer, raccoons, and blue jays, which may actually benefit from fragmentation, but it is hell on interior-dependent species like salamanders, goshawks, bats, and flying squirrels. The smaller the remnant the greater the influence of external factors and edge effects. A wise person once likened it to ice cubes: the smaller ones melt faster.
Is this a big problem? Construction, sure, messy, but once it’s up it’s not really a big deal? Or is there something I am missing? It’s not like they put in a divided highway with animal-killing traffic. The vast majority of the time, it’s just going to be a long, linear clearing. Nobody there, minimal noise.
They definitely do affect the local climate, and at a very large scale they can hypothetically change the albedo of the desert enough to affect global weather and climate patterns.
I guess my answer is no, it would literally cause the climate to change so by definition that's not mitigating climate change. It would be a form of geoengineering, which is sort of its own category separate from mitigation, which refers to action that reduces change.
https://www.blm.gov/visit/imperial-sand-dunes
https://www.blm.gov/visit/sand-mountain-recreation-area
https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/destination/oregon-dunes-natio...
https://www.nps.gov/grsa/index.htm
https://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/bruneau-dunes/
https://www.michigan.org/article/trip-idea/discover-amazing-...
This is a good thing.
But so will farming it, paving it over, parking over it, mining it for coal or pumping it for oil and gas.
https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/news/press-releases/2019/...
It's not especially difficult either from a permit point of view or technically, this is well proven in Europe. See for instance:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-ventures/intercon...
"Europe’s electricity system currently has more than 400 interconnectors and is the world’s largest interconnected grid. Currently Europe has around 93 GW of cross-border transmission capacity with a further 23 GW in construction/advanced permitting by 2025"
https://www.schroders.com/en-us/us/institutional/insights/wh...
agriculture production - ballpark of 4000-10000kg per acre sold at $1/kg, 2 harvests/year, i.e. $8000-$20000. Solar per acre - 300 days, 10 hours/day, 200Wt/m2, $0.04/KWh - $160/day at 50% coverage, ie. $50K/year.
In general - the plants efficiency is less than 5%, ie. at least 4x less than that of solar panels, and at the end everything is about energy (and information as both are opposite of entropy (ie. life and technology is about decreasing of entropy in the local neighborhood by shifting/exporting it out of the neighborhood into the wider environment))
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
For example 700k acres in one spot would not be ideal as transmission losses to other regions would be significant, so we need more possible space to allow distributed production.
Significant but not as much as one might think.
"Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
https://library.e.abb.com/public/d4863a9b0f77b74ec1257b0c005...
The next phases will be deciding where to actually put individual farms.
On paper, 22M acres is enough room for 1.78 TW annualised over a year[0], which is about 61% of current global electricity demand.
I doubt they'll get close to filling this land up with PV, but perhaps at least making this much available will reduce the rate at which people ask how much land PV needs to take up.
[0] 10% capacity factor, 20% efficient: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=22+million+acres+*+10%2...
"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.
However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."
(solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...
Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
Hopefully for something that tastes better than corn.
If I understand right, this protest was in part due to an attempt by the (German) government to reduce the level at which farmers are being subsidised.
Reason I bring this up, is that I have heard that the US only started using corn ethanol as an excuse to keep subsidising farmers, not because it was ever a good idea.
Blaming govt for water shortage despite new proactive policies like paying farmers to let fields flood (to replenish acquifiers).
No good deed goes unpunished.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180407183020/https://www.arb.c...
https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/MTBE_FactSheet.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_on_the_cob#Elote
There is however a special place in hell for the first person to come up with cornbread and serve it to another human being. No redeemable qualities. I’m not even sure if I would call it bread or food for that matter.
Also, except for emergencies, the corn wouldn't be diverted but the farmers would plant a different variety or different crop the next year.
I'm not talking about eating it just as corn. It's starch. It's oil. It's food component parts to use to make things humans enjoy.
Corn is everywhere and in everything. In the US at least.
there are also other crops that are better suited for starch/oil. so ultimately, to me, any use of corn other than food is basically just finding a way to subsidize the farmers. i'm not opposed to that, but if we're paying for it anyways, why not grow something better suited for purpose rather than just shoehorning corn as the solution?
If there is a year where nationwide farm output is, due to bad luck, significantly below average, we can take the crops that were going to make biofuel and use them to make cooking oil.
(IIRC farm output is always somewhat irregular, so this is a fairly plausible scenario).
If that's what's being defended against, it doesn't matter so much if it's a bit meh, it matters that you'd convinced farmers to plant the crops before they knew they'd be eaten. A government can also pay for overproduction of normal crops, but might want to reduce the cost of that by asking for a dual use crop.
I'm still not convinced doing this with corn is good, but it's at least the start of an argument that might convince me.
Food =/= just eat the corn as is. It's an ingredient in many many many foods. That's what I'm talking about. Starch. Oil.
And no, sweet corn (food corn for humans) is not appropriate to be used as field corn for biofuel. Too high of moisture content, even when dried. It just doesn't store well.
Finally - Per acre, you will be hard pressed to find a crop that can create as many products, including starch and oil, as corn. Please let me know what you're talking about here.
> If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States
Isn't really accurate. It could never provide that, simply because solar is too intermittent. With (theoretically huuuuuge batteries) it could perhaps, but those don't exist. So it couldn't.
The batteries exist of course. Tesla ships 40GWh a year of them, and they are scaling up the next Megapack manufacturing facility in China.
https://www.tesla.com/megafactory
So people get rich making battery factories. So what?
EDIT: I just realized that Wolfram does the conversion automatically, that's really cool.
Seems like the lower numbers come from older, obsolete PV technologies. Lots of improvement since even 2015.
At the area of land we're talking about (and the location of the land), dust (or cleaning), abrasive sand, lightning and hail are all going to be an issue for the panel lifetimes, if not their efficiency.
They're mostly not in areas with tornadoes, which is nice, but I think 30 years is pretty optimistic.
The "eco" side pushes solar and wind for everything and thinks nuclear plants inevitably explode. The "right wing" side pushes coal exclusively because it's sad that the few thousand coal miners left could lose their jobs.
Nobody's weighing these things with fair metrics.
Nuclear power plants without passive safety features need extra redundancy on the cooling systems, e.g. you need backup generators. There is no way that should add billions of dollars to the price of the plant.
They cost billions of dollars more because competitors (primarily coal and natural gas) lobby for rules that make them cost more on purpose, because they don't want to compete with a technology that should have a similar construction cost and negligible fuel cost. Especially when they're the suppliers of the fuel.
Fortunately for them nuclear is scary and then you can lobby not just for safety measures that make sense but also for ones with poor cost benefit ratios that only serve to make the plants uneconomically expensive. Then the coal companies shrug and say the market has decided.
Solar can supply about ten times our current needs with 1% of the surface of the Earth, a completely circular system where PV today makes PV tomorrow only has recurring costs of (1/(EROEI+1)) of the total output — x10 EROEI becomes 9% of the lifetime output of a cell being used to make the next cell.
They've been found to:
- improve soil conditions under them
- reduce water evaporation when installed over canals etc.
- provide habitat for certain kinds of farm and wild animals (much like sunken ships provide habitat for certain marine animals)
- provide insulation for structures that have them installed on the roofs
Solar is not coming to a government parking lot near you unless these hurdles are addressed. In the very least, not "all" government parkinglots.
It actually annoyed me a bit because my childhood elementary school is in my neighborhood of houses. And they constructed large metal structures in the parking lot and installed the solar. It's basically massive metal commercial metalwork, in a residential neighborhood. A bit weird.
What it usually doesn't have is 6x6" metal columns going up 20' into the air, and then diagonal metal roofing with solar panels on it.
Go ahead and try to get a permit to install a metal carport in front of your house in a normal town. I don't think you'll get it because it looks ridiculous in residential. But somehow they okd industrial metal solar installations in my neighborhood.
Definitely weird and not at all something we expect other people to live with.
And a substation might be required, so I guess bring it on. Solar panels in a parking lot could be done anywhere. Why install them in the parking lot in a quaint residential neighborhood? Why not just put them near city hall or any land the city owns but isn't in residential?
I get it, but I don't think it was really necessary or any more useful than solar on tons of other locations. The city is going to pay for x amount of electricity one way or another. They could have stick that solar in the bus terminal parking lot in the commercial side of town.
Land use per MWh https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Cost per MWh https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...
Other Pros / Cons I’m not going to link any sources for these. Things like the cost of local pollution, climate change, geo politics of where the energy/equipment comes from, etc all become quite controversial depending on one’s political leanings.
The above links are all US centric. And because of that it’s worth pointing out that the only metric that matters in the US is return on investment. With that in mind, solar, wind, and batteries are dominating all new installations in the US. For US specific information, both EIA.gov and FERC.gov are treasure troves of information.
Lastly, since you’ve mentioned land use specifically, it’s important to note that different countries have different priorities. South Korea and the US will look at land use very differently. For all practical purposes, the US has infinite land, so land use is largely irrelevant.
https://electrek.co/2021/07/26/us-largest-solar-farm-is-scra...
My comment comes from a place of pointing out a chain of events of engineering causing problems, then engineering solving those problems while creating new problems. Of course, if you just dismiss that plants and animals live there in the desert, then you don't need to think about them. But if you don't dismiss them but still need the solar power at all costs, then maybe studies could be commissioned that provide the ecosystem the best change for unintended negative change if the solar panels absolutely must be built.
And let's not act like these solar panels will have much to do, if anything, with helping to mitigate climate change.
You are welcome to comment on these assessments if you have concerns or input: https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2022371/570.
As the impact statement notes, there is already 9 gigawatts of solar deployed on BLM lands that we can study and learn from, to make sure the benefits outweigh the consequences.
Where do you think that power should be coming from to stop the cactus, brush and grasses from getting more shade?
It's a desert. There's arguably less biodiversity there than most places. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for there to still be plenty of cactuses and jackrabbits AND a massive amount of solar panels.
Rooftop and parking lot solar isn't the same thing. It's not automatically better. The efficiency of rooftop solar isn't nearly as good as an array that can follow the sun. Given finite resources you could make a case we're better off deploying those panels in a desert and connecting a big fat cable to them vs. a million houses all paying individual installers to install tiny, inefficient arrays piecemeal.
I thought it was well established that desert panels have to be cleaned constantly, and use huge amounts of water; without data im assuming that'll cost more than whatever efficiency gain you get from tracking panels verses non.
And parking lots just make sense -- lots store heat, cars get blistering, and solar gives power and shade...its a win win all day.
A decently balanced article on diversity in the Mojave -- https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-27/solar-p...
> "Global climate change will have far reaching impacts and change ecosystems across the world!"
> "Yeah, but solar panels will impact the ecosystem of this local desert so no."
> "You realize the local desert is also part of the global ecosystem will be impacted by climate change right? Right?..."
What specifically do you think solar panels will even hurt and why?
"Under the current policy, there are at least 80 million acres of federal lands open to oil and gas development, which is 100 times the amount of public land available for solar."
I have high hopes that we can provide enough energy by using already disturbed land
Based on what?
This is enough land to power every house in the US with solar if it was all used. It's interesting that even though crops are grown under solar panels all the time, you are worried about empty unused land and not the land already being used for oil and gas or the fact that 60% of all electricity still comes from fossil fuels in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Also dessert is not particularly good for panels. A panel could reach 70-80°C in such environment, when its optimal is at 25°C. Will lose around 25% efficiency.
As in, what is the effect of beaming out all that reflected solar energy into space, from the solar panels? (Assuming here that the tech still uses photovoltaic panels). Any negatives?
Most of what is today the United States was at one point or another purchased by the federal government, either willingly or forcefully, from its prior owner.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/agrivoltaics
Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground.
I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.
Humans can't eat electricity though.
> Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation
This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc.
Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission.
The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US.
> The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do.
Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves.
And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
Open space ("dirt") is potentially useful for tons of other uses, no point in wasting it on panels that can go on the roof.
There is a lot of unused open space way out far from cities. Electricity suffers from transmission losses, the more distance the more loss.
The ideal place to put that panel is on my roof which is just a few dozen feet from where it's going to be consumed. That'll be a lot more efficient than having it 500 miles away in the desert.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_03.html
You're confusing the line item called "transmission" with the concept that the electric utility's entire operations expense is in service of operating the power grid and all of that gets included in the price per kWh whenever you buy power through the grid.
A property owner who is installing their own solar and consuming the output themselves can avoid the other 56% of those costs. Which is well worth a one-time labor cost.
Roof solar uses a lot more labour, partly because roofs are inaccessible and need to seal, but also because roofs are smaller than fields.
A typical home solar install might take 3 guys a day to do - for maybe 6 kilowatts.
A typical field install can probably install 60 kilowatts with the same 3 guys in a day.
Comparing the efficiency of photosynthesis and photovoltaics is meaningless because they don't yield the same product.
In the real world, farm power is required for heavy equipment, battery banks, powering cell phone repeating towers on leased out land and entire paddocks are dedicated to mounting panels.
These can be ground panels (saves on mounting) or high mounts (to allow for tilt and track | animals to graze underneath)
See, for example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals.
What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away".
Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
If you want solar car parks, warehouse roofs, etc. there need to be feed-in tariffs to encourage building owners to do it.
Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might.
Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=new...
All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels.
But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated.
They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.
Will be interesting how they will plan to tear this all down in 40 years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39062512