The Bureau of Land Management reports that it has received applications for large solar electrical generating projects, around 80 of them, that would cover 689,910 acres of California, almost all of it in the desert.
689,910 acres is a big number, and it’s hard to put into perspective. Past a certain size, land area stats are a little hard to grasp. Two acres, the size of the piece of land my parents had when I was small, that’s an easier area to grasp, mentally: if it was all lawn, you could cover it with a walk-behind power mower, figuring a 12-inch wide swath mown at about three feet per second, in four hours or so.
At that speed, assuming you never took breaks to eat or sleep or stretch your lower back, if you started today you’d get 689,910 acres of lawn mowed sometime in June or July of 2165.
That’s still hard to imagine, and besides there is precious little lawn in the desert. How about comparing the 689,910 acres with familiar places of known area? 689,910 acres, about 1,078 square miles, is more than three times the size of New York City, the five-borough total of which runs to 309 square miles. Sprawling Los Angeles, at 465 square miles contained within its city limits, doesn’t even reach half the size of the pending desert solar projects. Anza Borrego Desert State Park, the second-largest state park in the US, covers approximately 600,000 acres. It is huge, but it covers less land area than these solar projects would.
Put it this way: if you bulldozed every bit of land in the city limits of both Phoenix and Houston—possibly a good idea in and of itself—then put all the pending California Desert solar projects on the land that had been occupied by those cities, you’d have just sixteen square miles left over, which I suppose you would need for employee parking.
Yesterday, in the course of a KCRW Interview featuring Coyote Crosser Larry Hogue, among others, it was pointed out that the staggering acreage covered by these proposals will likely be whittled down, that this is a bit of a land rush that has as much speculation at its root as energy policy planning. It was also pointed out that while current technology for big solar development involves grading the site, destroying all habitat thereon and essentially paving the land with mirrors, that we’ll likely be able, within the next couple years, to install massive photovoltaic fields where the only ground disturbance necessary is the pile-driving of supports for the panels. Oh, and driving the supply trucks and installation machinery from one pole to the next. And running cable between them. And maintaining maintenance access roads.
Paving the desert.
Take a look at this map the BLM provides of proposals in the California Desert. There’s a site hard up against the east border of the Mojave National Preserve: called the New York Mountains site, the red crosshatched area actually falls in the Lanfair Valley, a bit of extremely marginal ranchland and irreplaceable Joshua tree forest that was jerrymandered out of the Preserve boundaries before final passage of the California Desert Protection Act in 1994. It was excluded from the Preserve because locals raised a stink, fearing the Preserve management would forever change their way of life. Paving the Lanfair Valley with mirrors is apparently a less drastic change for the ranchers than just buying out the grazing rights, as the Preserve would have done.
Or look at the east end of the (789,745-acre) Joshua Tree National Park, at the mouth of that “little” notch in the Park boundary. That’s a valley that has had a few projects planned for it, including a gigantic garbage dump that would have been the final resting place for Los Angeles’ unrecycled aluminum cans and uncomposted disposable diapers. Now it’s contending with a giant solar project, in an area that—like the Lanfair Valley—should by rights now be protected in perpetuity.
A few days ago The Raven and I drove through Ward Valley, west of Needles. I told her how the valley had been the site of a proposed commercial nuclear waste dump, in which so-called “low-level” waste would have been buried in unlined trenches. The project was never approved, due to the efforts of the Mojave and Chemehuevi people and their allies like my friend Phil Klasky. There is now a solar project proposed for Ward Valley as well.
Just south and west of the spot where the city of Las Vegas wants to build a major international airport in the Ivanpah Valley, backers of the proposed Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System would build three heliostat towers, on which more than 3,000 acres of mirrors would concentrate the desert sun. Water heated in the focal points of the mirror arrays would drive turbines, which would generate a peak of 400 megawatts of electrical power. The installation would use up to a hundred acre-feet per year of groundwater. I have not yet been able to determine whether the site would cover some of the tortoise relocation area cited in planning documents for the Ivanpah Airport: at a minimum, tortoises would have to be relocated from both sites and put somewhere else, a process that has recently proven to be pretty much a death sentence for the tortoises.
All told, if the 80 solar installations in the California Desert are built, they’ll produce a peak of 54 gigawatts of electrical power. This would represent a doubling of California’s electrical generating capacity. It’s clear that these projects are not being proposed as part of a sensible energy strategy, with conserved “negawatts” at the forefront of the strategy. As the majority of current generating capacity in California is much closer to urban areas, these new sites would mean a significant additional loss of energy through transmission line inefficiency.
This assault on the desert is, plain and simple, intended to line the pockets of speculators looking to stake a claim in a burgeoning “green” energy field. Big solar may be a sensible idea in a few unusual locations, but in general it represents business as usual for the energy companies.
And the desert pays.
This is exactly the sort of thing missing from all the enthusiasm about a “Green Revolution.” And it’s much subtler than the whole corn ethanol thing.
But what’s to be done? Great strides in efficiency are a key component of any genuine sustainable future, yet look at what happened to Jimmy Carter and his sweater. If we don’t “harness the free market” to develop alternative energy, in accordance with Holy American Capitalism, we’ll continue with the status quo, which eventually has nations with the most guns desperately chasing the last dribs and drabs of fossil fuels. Yet direct state intervention wouldn’t guarantee better results: consider the TVA. And even land that the government protects is only as safe as the current government wants it to be.
Now, perhaps governments could be slightly less stupid and get entrepreneurs to work smarter. For one thing, why does large-scale solar energy collection have to be done out in the wilderness? Lots of sunlight shines on Phoenix, too. Heliostat towers don’t have to use water to drive turbines. Wind farms have been very successful when placed on existing farmland in the Midwest; they don’t have to tear up prairie grassland or other habitat. Etc, etc, etc. But, no, we stupid apes will stampede into alternative energy the same way we’ve stampeded into all the other bubbles. Yet I cling to the thought that bright green environmentalism still contains the word “environmentalism.” I don’t want the mdslet* to grow up in a world with dreadful resource wars. But I also don’t want the mdslet to grow up in a world where it’s no longer possible to get out into the middle of nowhere and watch the horned toads go about their business. Maybe if we can just get everyone moved to the Lagrange Points, and turn the whole planet into a preserve.
Well, that’s some of my usual rambling incoherence, but minus the profanity. I must be getting soft.
*Yes, I’m probably going to be working mention of the mdslet into unrelated comments for a while yet.
Sure, we need conservation and wind power and rooftop solar and all that. But the fact remains that if you want solar power, you’ve got to build solar power plants. You say building all these plants would double California’s generating capacity, but how much of the current capacity is coal, oil and nuclear—things that will have to go?
689,910 acres is a big number and we need to plan carefully to minimize the disturbance caused by these projects. But NIMBYism isn’t what we need.
We also shouldn’t be flippant about the costs and potential loss of habitat. We need to be smart and learn from past mistakes. The desert is a fragile environment—as fragile as the tundras of the Arctic. Life is valuable in and of itself.
Can we not find a way to meet our own needs that doesn’t entail wholesale destruction of our planet?
Jane wrote: “But the fact remains that if you want solar power, you’ve got to build solar power plants.”
Big solar power plants are just one way to get solar power, and far from the best. There are many other things we could be doing to get solar power. The fact that solar thermal is always talked about as the ONLY realistic way to get solar power has more to do with politics than it does with the technology. The massive investments companies have made in thin-film PV this year show that this technology is very competitive with solar thermal.
Then the question becomes, why not put it on rooftops and parking lots, and even on the sides of buildings, rather than in pristine habitat? There’s one reason we don’t see more of this: we don’t allow businesses and homeowners to become power producers, and that’s because the big utilities don’t want the competition.
I would change your sentence around to: “If you want solar power you’ve got to have a realistic Feed-in Tariff system.” Germany has a very successful one, and so do 40 other countries. The U.K. just passed a Feed-in Tariff law. This pays PV owners for every watt they produce—in the UK up to 5 megawatts and in Germany with no limits. Germany is putting in 2000 megawatts of PV a year, much of it “building-integrated.”
In California, a state that at least has net-metering, you can get paid for your meter spinning backward “up to a point,” in the words of one of my fellow guests on last night’s radio program. You reach that point when you’ve put as much power onto the grid as you’ve taken off over the course of the year. If you actually put more power onto the grid than you’ve taken off, your utility gets those watts for free. And to be eligible for the California Solar Initiative rebates, your system has to be sized so that you just about balance out your power use with your power generation, meaning it’s smaller than it could be.
Put in a feed-in tariff like Germany’s and PV would take off in a major way here, where we have more sun than Germany, and plenty of parking lots and big box stores and commercial warehouses, not to mention massive tracts of houses spread across the landscape. Individual homeowners and businesses from small to large could become power producers—power to the people.
PV is already cheaper than solar thermal, but the solar thermal proponents don’t want you to know that. PV obviously has far less environmental impact at the point of installation than solar thermal, it uses no water in its operation (and some solar thermal plants use vastly greater amounts of water than the one Chris mentioned), and no power is lost in transmission across long distances.
So the question then becomes, why would we even think about scraping desert landscapes for a power plant until we’ve done everything we can to promote point-of-use solar in urban areas? If anyone tells you we are doing everything we can to promote PV, or that it’s just not practical compared to solar thermal, they’re either thinking about the situation in 2005 rather than the one in 2008, or they’ve got an iron in the solar thermal fire.
BTW, Chris and I seem to be on the same brain wave here—I just put up a big post covering solar thermal (or Concentrating Solar Power—CSP) versus PV over on www.desertblog.net.
All that blathering, and I forgot to say: Nice post, Chris. I’ll link to it tomorrow.
BIPV is great, but what’s the source for PV being cheaper than solar thermal? Every source I’ve ever seen says the opposite. Also, with solar thermal, you don’t have to get tens of millions of businesses and homeowners to individually decide to put solar cells on their buildings. Finally, the current grid isn’t engineered for large numbers of small sources, and changing it will take a long time.
We need to be thoughtful about where things go and try to minimize habitat disturbance. (BTW, the mirrors of a solar thermal plant are on legs, so little ground area is actually covered.) In particular, power plants should be as close to cities as possible. But in the end, there will always be tradeoffs.
Of course, if you listen to eco-design proponents, the question becomes, “How can we build power sources that protect or even enhance habitats?”. BTW, do desert animals ever take advantage of shade under solar thermal mirrors?
Jane, here’s one source: http://www.bateswhite.com/news/pdf/07012008_BusinessMoney.pdf
Engineer Bill Powers is another, and I quote here from his comments on the RETI draft Phase 1B report: “Tens of thousands of MW of utility-scale PV projects are being proposed because thin-film PV technology is cost-competitive with other solar options such as solar trough. In contrast single-axis polycrystalline silicon PV is not cost competitive with solar trough or any other renewable energy technology… The thin-film PV capital cost identified in the draft Phase 1B report is $3,700/KWe, with an associated COE ranging from $114/MWh to $176/MWh. This compares to an incrementally higher COE cost range identified by B&V;for solar trough of $143/MWh to $192/MWh.”
Regarding the area covered by solar mirrors, every photo I’ve seen of an existing plant shows the ground entirely scraped, so it doesn’t matter how little area the supports themselves take up. No life will exist there. I doubt any wildlife biologist would support the concept of shade provided by solar mirrors compensating for the loss of plant cover, crushing of burrows, loss of microbiotic crust and soil moisture, and on and on.
Even if providing shade for desert wildlife could somehow be shown to be “beneficial,” that’s not something any conservationist would support.
Repeating what Larry has said: Feed-in tariffs will make this happen. No need to work to get people to agree. Commercial property owners are champing at the bit for this, and small owners will follow. To have your monthly electric bill be income rather than expense is all the incentive most people will need.
Tortoises often seek shade under built objects, and those that survived construction of big solar projects and wandered into the mirror field would likely hang out in the shade of a mirror from time to time.
But it’d be an exposed shelter, visible to predators, and few vulnerable animals would likely feel safe there.
Also, caribou rub off their winter coats on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and San Joaquin kitfoxes find shelter in lengths of PVC pipe in Central Valley oilfields, and neither the TAPS nor the pumpjacks are boons to wildlife habitat. Just because animals can occasionally cope and make the best of situations doesn’t mean the situation is to their benefit.
And above all, the question remains: what RIGHT do we have to do this? What RIGHT do we have to scrape clean—let’s not fool ourselves here—to bulldoze wild habitat so that we don’t have to change our lifestyles all that much?
Jane, I see from your profile that you’re from Georgia, so you might not be familiar with the acronym “RETI”. It stands for “Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative” and it’s a California initiative to identify what places might be suitable for building big solar plants and wind farms, and then to prioritize building transmission to those spots. (You’ll notice that if we’re building transmission to new power sources, rather than kicking fossil fueled power off of existing transmission, we’re not really reducing our carbon footprint—we’re just increasing our energy use rather than reducing it.)
Anyway, the rhetoric about this initiative is that it will “be thoughtful about where things go and minimize habitat disturbance.” But behind the scenes, the concentrating solar power industry is fighting tooth and nail against any guidelines for the process that would achieve those goals. For instance, we think that a rational approach (if you’re going to have large solar at all) would be to place it in disturbed lands like abandoned farm land and also near existing transmission lines. Such places do exist in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. But these guidelines are non-starters with the concentrating solar power industry because they’d rather use free public land. I hope to have a post on this topic up on www.desertblog.net early next week.
In the meantime, you might be interested in today’s post on the impact Feed-in Tariffs (Fair Payment for Solar) would have on getting PV to take off like it has in Germany. (And there’s a good question for you: why can Germany put in 2000 megawatts of PV a year, but California can’t?) The post addresses that question, as well as your concern about how to get a lot of individual homeowners and businesses to go solar. As to the impact of ramping up lots of PV onto the grid, I’d say if the Germans can figure that out, so can we. I’ve only heard that having solar reducing peak demand at the hottest part of the day is a benefit to the grid (though the utilities point out that peak demand happens at 5:00 p.m. when people get home and kick up the A/C, turn on the TV, etc., after the PV is no longer sending power to the grid).
Sorry we’re ganging up on you a bit here…