Problems with Big Desert Solar
December 3rd, 2008 Posted by Larry Hogue in renewable energyAn article in today’s LA Times made Concentrating Solar Power plants sound like the best thing since the sun began to shine. It did mention that “Environmentalists are mobilizing” against these projects (ooh, ominous!), but didn’t mention what the environmental concerns could be. The reader is left to assume that it’s just the usual enviro-wackos who are opposed to everything for their own nefarious reasons.
If you’re new to this issue, here’s a rundown of the actual concerns we have about Big Solar in the desert, followed by some better alternatives:
- The desert is just as valuable a landscape as a forest, providing habitat for countless species specifically adapted to the unique requirements of this particular environment. Like forests, the desert also provides an array of values for human enjoyment, not limited to the beauty of open spaces. We don’t see forests being clearcut to make way for solar mirrors, because that would clearly be absurd. Yet thousands and even millions of acres of desert are currently proposed to be scraped to make way for solar power plants and their accompanying transmission lines.
- While a clearcut could one day grow back to something like its former health, what happens with concentrating solar power plants in the desert is far worse: the entire project area is scraped bare.
With the slow plant growth and soil creation rates in the desert, this destruction could take eons to heal. This kind of direct habitat destruction is the main cause of the massive extinction event the Earth is currently experiencing. In the desert, we’re specifically talking about such creatures as the desert tortoise (California’s state reptile) and the Mojave ground squirrel, both listed as threatened species. Creating such vast swaths of destroyed habitat to provide energy for human use is no greener than any other type of habitat destruction.
- In addition to destroying habitat for plants and animals, scraping the desert bare could actually contribute to global warming. As reported here previously, studies have shown that the Mojave Desert in particular stores as much carbon as some temperate forests. Scraping the ground cover, including microbiotic crusts, would remove this function of the desert as a carbon sink, offsetting to some (currently unknown) extent the greenhouse gas reductions provided by the solar power project.
- Concentrating solar power plants also use vast quantities of water when they are “wet-cooled,” somewhere in the range of two million or more gallons per megawatt per year. One 280-megawatt plant proposed in Arizona is projected to use 600 to 700 million gallons (1900 acre-feet) each year. Where will that water come from? This is a desert after all. Will it come from our dwindling and over-subscribed Colorado River supply? Or from the desert’s own scant groundwater, vital for maintaining many desert habitats? The impacts from pumping desert groundwater would extend far beyond the footprint of the projects themselves. The decline of mesquite groves around Borrego Springs is just one example of the impacts of groundwater pumping. Since the groundwater could eventually run out completely, this practice is by definition not “renewable.”*
- Many of the proposed concentrating solar power plants would be sited far from existing transmission, adding greatly to the cost and environmental impact of this form of solar power when new transmission lines are factored in.
- All of these impacts, and more, should be thoroughly considered before pushing ahead with any solar project. Yet the Governor and the concentrating solar industry have been pushing to relax environmental review, because these projects are viewed as de facto green.
So if large concentrating solar power plants are a bad idea, how do we combat global warming? The Desert Protective Council agrees that action is vital, because global warming could soon rival habitat destruction as the leading cause of species extinction, and will also add immeasurably to human misery. Here are several ideas, in rough order of priority:
- First, focus on energy efficiency and conservation. The cheapest and greenest watt is the one you never produce. While California has gone far in energy conservation, we could go much farther. We should be seeing massive investments in this area on a scale comparable to what is currently proposed for increasing energy supply. The CPUC has already required public utilities to reach “100% of cost-effective energy efficiency measures” by 2020. According to engineer Bill Powers, “The net effect of this decision will be an average absolute decline in annual energy usage between 0.5 and 1 percent per year from 2008 forward, and no growth in peak demand over time.” But many of the players in the renewable energy field continue to insist that our energy use will grow, despite this decision. The bottom line is that it should be just as profitable for big utilities to help consumers and businesses save electricity (through better insulation and other approaches) as it is to build a power line. These approaches should also be required in all new building codes.
Second, when thinking about increasing the supply of renewable energy, focus on rooftop or “building-integrated” solar power, i.e. photovoltaics, before even thinking about disturbing the desert to create solar power. This power is generated right at the point of use, saving the construction of wasteful and expensive transmission lines, and it can be done with little environmental impact if placed on existing structures. No lengthy environmental review processes are required. If done right, it also places the power in the hands of the people, not massive corporations.
- Contrary to the L.A. Times article, advances in thin-film photovoltaic panels have made this technology cost-competitive with concentrating solar power**. We have a good article about this new cost competitiveness posted on our main website.
- But beyond this new cost-competitiveness, California just needs to do one simple thing to ramp up distributed rooftop solar power to major levels: pay solar panel owners for every kilowatt they produce, with no limit on how much they can produce.*** This new approach, known as a “Feed-In Tariff,” has already had major success in Germany, where the sun don’t shine nearly as much as it does here in SoCal. Despite its relatively small size and less than ideal weather, Germany is adding 2000 megawatts of PV power per year. We could clearly beat that in California. Currently, people aren’t jumping all over PV to “save the planet” or even to save modestly on their electric bills, but you can bet they will when they can do it to make money, just as the Germans have. (We imagine that there are a lot of people who would just love a way to make money with their houses right now.) The main reason we don’t have a feed-in tariff already? Utility companies hate the idea, for reasons that aren’t hard to guess. (See the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy’s website for a great article on the German model.)
- There are a host of other approaches to balancing the energy supply-demand equation beyond renewable energy and efficiency, including Combined Heat and Power, smart metering, improvements to the electricity distribution system, and more. For one plan that combines all of these approaches, achieving a projected 50% reduction in energy-related carbon footprint, see the San Diego Smart Energy 2020 report.
- If large CSP plants really do become necessary (and we think that day will not come any time soon, if ever), then a rational approach would be to build them on already disturbed lands near existing transmission lines and water sources, avoiding the worst of their environmental consequences. While some experts hope that just such an approach will be followed, we’re more skeptical. The CSP industry has already objected strenuously to siting guidelines that would require this rational approach. This is because the big developers have already filed for permits on distant, pristine desert lands, and don’t want preference given to companies with proposals closer to cities, transmission lines and water sources. Also, it’s cheaper to use public land for free than it is to lease from a land owner.
Clearly, developing renewable energy sources is important, but we need to do it the right way. If we fail to take a considered approach, we may end up walking into the same trap that we did with ethanol. We don’t need more wasteful boondoggles that don’t really solve the problem.
*Another method of cooling, called dry-cooling, would use far less water. But this approach drives up the costs for CSP dramatically, while reducing its efficiency on the hottest summer days, right when the energy is most needed in the Southwest.
**Here are the gory details on the cost figures for PV vs. CSP. The L.A. Times article quoted a price of 18 cents per kilowatt-hour for CSP plants compared to a price for SCE’s rooftop solar project of 27 cents per kilowatt-hour. The problem with these numbers are that CSP plant developers benefit from federal tax breaks for renewable energy, while public utilities – so far – can’t. So comparing a subsidized industry and technology to one that is not subsidized is hardly fair. What’s more, federal legislation passed in October will give those same breaks to publicly owned utilities. When those breaks come on-line, the price for photovoltaic projects like SCE’s should drop to 12 cents per kwh, meaning CSP plants produce power that is 50% more expensive than PV.
***Currently, “net metering” customers can only get paid for the same amount of power that they draw from the utility during a given year — any excess goes to the utility for free. Further, to qualify for the Solar Initiative rebate, the system must be sized to balance in-flows and out-flows almost exactly.
27 Responses to “Problems with Big Desert Solar”
By guardian de los parques on Dec 3, 2008
Good job on KCRW and regarding this post. Informative AREP link to the German casestudy.
regards Gidon
By Chris Clarke on Dec 4, 2008
Sounded good!
By Larry Hogue on Dec 4, 2008
Thanks, Chris and Gidon.
By Jim Harvey on Dec 7, 2008
Another great report Larry. I really appreciate your efforts to counter the Big Solar myths. I like the way you make a complicated energy issue easy to understand.
By Julian Zimmerle on Dec 12, 2008
Keep in mind, that only about 3 percent of the world’s desert land area would have to be used for power generation, to supply all of humanity’s energy needs. Compare that to logging all of the world’s rainforests and using that land for growing energy plants for bio-fuels, which could still only meet a small percentage of our energy needs.
Also there are many different CSP technologies, and they have very different requirements as far as land use goes. Many do not need a leveled, scraped-bare ground to build on, and many do not need water for cooling, either. So not all CSP technologies destroy all of the desert area they are built on.
By Larry Hogue on Dec 12, 2008
Thanks for the comment, Julian. When put that way, solar development in deserts sounds quite benign. Given that only 3 percent of the land area would be needed, it should be easy to find already disturbed desert lands for solar projects, right?
However, looking at what is happening in California’s deserts right now, these projects are not being developed in the most benign ways. See our Dec. 11 blog post
for more on what is actually happening here. To summarize, projects are proposed for pristine lands containing rare plant populations. These projects use the kind of CSP technology that does require scraping the entire project area. Proposals to use already disturbed lands have been denied by the solar industry.
Our point is, if the solar industry continues to tout the benign nature of its projects, then it should ensure that these projects are built in the most benign way possible.
We’re aware of other technologies, such as thin film photovoltaic, that can be built without scraping the entire project area. Then the question is, why not build these in urban areas, right where the power is needed? If the answer to that is, “it’s hard to get all these individual projects to happen quickly enough,” our response is a Feed-in Tariff, as they’ve used in Germany and 40 other countries.
The suburban sprawl that has occurred in southern California and parts of Arizona has provided plenty of rooftop and parking lot space receiving plenty of sunshine. These are the first places we should be looking for benign solar development.
By Robert Palgrave on Dec 26, 2008
I share the concerns about insensitive developments affecting desert habitats. However – solar PV installations in Germany comprise just about half of the worldwide installed capacity yet generate less than 0.5% of Germany’s total energy needs.
I haven’t seen any projections for a sunnier region like California to give an idea of what proportion of energy needs could be met by rooftop, parking lot, building integrated PV. It must be bigger than Germany’s current level of 0.5%. Could anyone comment?
If generation by PV gets too big a proportion of the total, you are rather exposed on cloudy days and of course overnight.
The solution has to be a mix of different renewables – like CSP, PV, CPV, wind, marine, geothermal. The mix has to have the generating capacity to match consumer demand profiles (daily and seasonal) and must optimise value in terms of environmental impact, emboddied carbon etc in building and operation, reliability, cost of normal and abnormal maintenance etc.
PV by itself can’t provide the full answer. Neither can wind. A blend of different renewables increases the overall reliability of supply and drives down the need for fossil-fuel and nuclear back up generating capacity.
By Julian Zimmerle on Feb 6, 2009
I would also like to mention that People vastly over-estimate the potential of most renewable energy sources, and under-estimate the scale of the task we are facing. Building our future energy supply is by far the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. To meet it, we would have to build one new big nuclear power plant every day for the next few decades, and we are already a decade behind schedule. If we actually did this, we would run out of uranium within a few years while turning our planet into a toxic nuclear waste dump.
CSP ist the only technology currently available which has the potential to solve our energy problems. Hopefully it will be complemented in the near future by new technologies.
For more info on this, I recommend the excellent presentation by Dr. Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech):
http://nsl.caltech.edu/energy.html
He also gave a very good presentation on a possible future technology to solve the energy problem, which his team is working on at CalTech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtjaVVmGJCU
By Larry Hogue on Feb 18, 2009
Julian,
I have to disagree with you when you say “CSP is the only technology currently available…” Clearly, photovoltaic power can satisfy a much higher percentage of our power needs than commonly thought just two years ago. Energy efficiency and conservation are also usually given short-shrift in public policy. The current U.S. economic stimulus package, with only $5 billion for home weatherization, is a good example of this.
DPC’s position is not that no CSP should ever be built, but that what CSP we do need, after fully taking energy efficiency and the contribution of photovoltaics into account, should be sited on brownfields, abandoned ag land, and other heavily disturbed sites.
But this is not what we see happening in California. The first proposals for CSP to enter the permitting process, BrightSource’s and Stirling Energy Systems’, are both on decent to good habitat covering over 18,000 acres. BrightSource’s Ivanpah project will cover 4,000 acres of good desert tortoise habitat. That habitat also provides a lot more carbon sequestration than previously or commonly thought. The trade-offs with this project in particular are just too severe to count it as good for the environment when looking at the total picture.
When California has a Feed-In Tariff similar to Germany’s, when we have building codes and other laws that require retrofitting buildings to have the highest energy efficiency possible, then we might agree that the next step should be large-scale CSP plants.
By Julian Zimmerle on Feb 23, 2009
Larry,
please review the presentations by Dr. Lewis. They clearly show why photovoltaic and energy efficiency will not help us much. To sum up his analysis: the former can not deliver energy on demand (there is no remotely efficient enough storage of electricity) and the latter will at best compensate future demand increases.
Photovoltaic is also way too expensive, and the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) is not good enough. Any energy source needs to have an EROEI of at least 30:1, provide cheap and efficient storage of at least six to nine hours, be cheap enough in mass-production to compete with nuclear, use resources that are plentiful on earth, and has to utilise solar to be viable as our future energy supply. For the details, watch Dr. Lewis’ presentation, and maybe read some of my energy-related blog entries on http://www.zimmerle.de.
I have spent months full-time researching our options, and there is no other currently available technology that comes even close to meeting these requirements, apart from CSP.
I would also like to add, that I have no stake in the CSP business. In fact I am quite disappointed that there are no other options, as I was really hoping for a solution that would not favor the big power utility companies, which have been fighting renewables and competition in their markets right, left and center, trying to build monopolies and oligopolies, for as long as I can remember.
By Julian Zimmerle on Feb 23, 2009
Larry,
Of course it is wrong to destroy habitats, I already agreed with you on that. Do BrightSource and Stirling Energy Systems give any reasons why they picked these sites and why they could not use other sites?
I agree that feed-in tariffs and optimizing buildings’ energy efficiency are very much necessary, but I don’t agree that we should do one thing after the other. Time is of the essence here, we really should have continued, expanded and intensified Jimmy Carter’s renewable energy projects. Instead we did almost nothing for two decades. Now we have to try to make up for lost time, or face terrible consequences.
You should also not over-estimate the usefulness of feed-in tariffs. Here in Germany we have had them for almost a decade now, and we still only get about 1 percent of or electricity from photovoltaic. It worked quite well for wind-farms, though. So much so, that we are quickly running out of good sites for those and are looking into off-shore wind-farms.
By Larry Hogue on Feb 23, 2009
Julian,
To respond to both of your recent comments: First, I have to admit I haven’t had time to read those reports, although I did scan them. Will get to them at some point.
You really should read our blog post on RETI posted January 9. To summarize:
*Thin-film PV is now a lot cheaper than PV used to be — it’s now roughly equivalent to CSP, though there is still a lot of denial of this fact
*Taking this new cost into account, RETI found that 46,000 GWH/yr could be provided by PV in California. That’s nearly 2/3 of the way to the 33% renewable energy target in California. (Perhaps you feel this target is not high enough, but it’s one of the highest anywhere, and we need to agree on what targets we’re trying to hit, not just “do as much as possible.”)
*Further, RETI does not give enough credit to California’s own newly enacted energy efficiency requirements. If it did, that renewable energy target would be 40,000 GWh/yr, not 68,000. (Properly including energy efficiency and PV in planning is what we mean by prioritizing these ahead of CSP, not that you would actually install all of this before building a CSP plant. And in this planning process, they are not being prioritized or even included accurately.)
*Taking those two facts together, there’s a strong argument to be made that PV can meet California’s 33% renewable energy target.
To address your other points:
*CSP storage: that’s fine in theory, but not all CSP plants have storage, which requires a molten salt vat or something similar. None of the projects that are farthest along in the permitting process in California offer storage, so they do not meet the requirements that you listed in your comment. Yet we are going ahead with them anyway. They are really just peaking power, just like PV, so where’s the advantage? Neither will offset even a fraction of a coal-fired power plant, despite claims to the contrary for CSP by some environmental groups. (One plant that’s about to be built in Arizona, the Abengoa project, will have molten salt storage.)
*Why did they choose sites in good habitat rather than disturbed lands? Economics. It’s simply cheaper to build on free and open public land than on privately owned farm land. For BrightSource’s Ivanpah project, this is exactly the conclusion that the California Energy Commission’s staff assessment came to, letting the company off the hook for moving their project to abandoned farm land near Daggett. This is particularly galling, because these fields are adjacent to the original Solar One project site. You can see it on Google Earth if you search for Daggett California and Solar One — there’s the circular Solar One project site, then a bunch of other circles of about the same size that are ag fields, many of them (apparently — need to do more checking on this) abandoned.
Sounds like you know energy economics pretty well, but in environmental economics there’s a term “externalized costs.” That’s exactly what the CEC is allowing BrightSource to do — externalize its costs of doing business onto the public in terms of lost habitat on public lands for a threatened species — the desert tortoise.
*The German model — you make a good point about the total energy coming from PV in Germany, but this is likely due to the country’s weak insolation. The better figure to focus on is that Germany is putting in 1500 nameplate megawatts of PV a year, and should have 10,000 total by next year. In California, we brag about 150 mw a year, which is just pitiful. If California put in 1800 MW per year starting this year, it would have enough PV capacity to produce 40,000 GWh/yr by 2020, meeting the 33% RPS goal once energy efficiency initiatives are taken fully into account. So our priority should be removing the roadblocks that keep that rate of installation from happening, and the best ways to do that are with a real Feed-In Tariff and full implementation of the new property tax-based solar financing.
By Julian Zimmerle on Feb 25, 2009
Larry,
I’m sure that those CSP projects, which currently do not include thermal storage, will soon be retrofitted with it, simply because it allows them to make better use of the very expensive turbines. Those make up about 30% of the cost of current CSP plants, and comparatively cheap heat storage allows them to run those expensive turbines about twice as long per day.
As for the cost of thin-film-PV, I know that the cost has come down to almost CSP level. The difference is, that PV has achieved that through fully-automated mass-production, which means that further cost reductions can only come through new technological breakthroughs. CSP however is not yet mass-produced, and thus has lots of potential (a factor of four to five times cheaper) for further cost reductions with current technologies. The desertec studies have shown, that current CSP technology has the potential to out-perform nuclear and even approach coal if used in areas of good insolation and with true mass-production.
But the best reason to go for CSP is not cost, but EROEI which is between 25:1 and 70:1 for a CSP plant in Arizona or northern Afrika. By comparison PV has a EROEI of between 1:1 and 6:1. I know the PV manufacturers give much better values, but on the EI side they only count the energy used for panel production. There are many more things that really need to be included, though, like energy used for building the PV manufacturing plant, transportion and refinement of raw materials, transportation and installation of panels, etc.
By Larry Hogue on Feb 25, 2009
Julian,
Again, the Desert Protective Council does not oppose outright all Concentrating Solar projects. Our main concern is that the ones that may get built should be directed away from valuable habitats and wild places and onto brown fields and abandoned ag lands. To achieve that goal, the number of these projects must be limited, and so energy efficiency and PV must be allowed to contribute the maximum amount possible. And right now we’re not doing that in California.
On your points about EROEI: I’m no expert in economics, but I’m going to guess that this is chiefly a concern of investors. One smart commenter on Grist recently said that the main reason for CSP plants is to have projects large enough to attract investors. Small PV companies can’t really do that. But clearly, individuals in Germany already have enough of an incentive through the Feed-In Tariff to use a lot of PV, or they wouldn’t be installing 1500MW per year. In California, if we added a strong Feed-In Tariff to the newly expanded Federal tax credit, California Solar Initiative rebates, and AB 811 financing (which we hope will soon be enacted by every major city in the state), then we would easily be able to match Germany in the pace of PV installations. This rate of installation has already been demonstrated to get us a long way toward our 33% renewable energy goal, or perhaps even surpassing it. (And by the way, did you know that solar power produced by utility ratepayers currently is not counted toward the RPS goal?) I really don’t see where EROEI applies to whether or not we get a lot of PV installed in the state, or not. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say if we did have a strong FIT, we wouldn’t need some or all of those other subsidies for PV solar.
As to retrofitting CSP projects for storage: The Stirling Solar projects, which account for impacts to 14,000 acres of the desert, produce the power right at each individual “Suncatcher” station using individual Stirling engines, so it’s hard to see how this heat could be concentrated and stored for later use — they’d have to retrofit each of the thousands of Suncatchers they’re building. And that’s if this technology works at all, which some engineers who have tested it doubt. You may be right that BrightSource’s technology can be retrofitted later, but then the question is, why aren’t they doing this now, if it’s so economical? The point is, right now it’s being sold as off-setting coal-fired power plants, which it won’t do.
By Julian Zimmerle on Mar 2, 2009
Larry,
The EROEI of any technology simply tells you one thing: Wether it is an energy source (EROEI >1:1, so you get more energy out than you use to build and run it) or an energy sink (EROEI <1:1, so you get less energy out than you use to build and run it). Examples of energy sinks are ethanol made from corn (EROEI of about 0.85:1) and PV in Germany (EROEI of about 0.95:1). If the technology has an EROEI of about 1:1, it simply is a means to re-label fossil energy sources to “reneable” ones.
If it is an energy source, and you also know its life-time, you can calculate how fast it can be deployed/scaled-up sustainably. Lets say we would like to grow PV sustainably in an area of insolation where PV can achieve an EROEI of 2:1. We know the life-time of PV cells is about 25 to 40 years, so lets assume an average of about 32 years. From that we can tell, that we could get twice the energy we invested out of PV after 32 years. Since the intial investment was made with fossil energy which would be compensated after about 16 years of operation, we could only sustainably renew our PV installation after the remaining 16 years of operation. Since the new installation did not use any fossil energy sources, we could from now on double the installation size every 32 years. So we would not get any sustainable growth within the first 32 years, but after that we could double the installed PV capacity every 32 years. However, if we did that, we would not have any of the solar energy left for anything besides the production, installation, and operation of new PV plants. So it would be a rather pointless exercise.
This shows us, that we need renewable energy sources with a much greater EROEI ratio than 2:1, if we want to grow reneables within a reasonable time-frame and use their generated energy at the same time.
Lets run through an example based on PV in southern California, where it might achieve an EROEI ratio of about 4:1. There it would only take about 8 years to break even, after 16 years we could have doubled, and after 24 years quadrupled the PV installation. At the end of the life time of the first plant, we could end up with an eightfold increase of PV power generation capacity. Now this already looks a lot better than our previous example, right?
However, even in these great circumstances it is not nearly good enough to compensate for dwindling oil production and to combat climate change.
Why? Our initial installation is based on fossil fuels, of which we can only allocate a tiny amount to building renewable energy sources, without breaking the rest of our economy. So our initial installation size is very limited, but we still have to meet enormous generating capacity goals in the near future.
Ten years from now we will have to have replaced coal with renewables, and another 15 years later we would have to have done the same with oil, followed by natural gas another ten years after that. At the same time we will have to make enormous progress on energy efficiency and find a way to extract a good portion of the CO2 we have put in the atmosphere in the past. Because until we have finished the transformation of our econonmy to run on renable instead of fossil energy sources, we will still add more CO2 to the atmosphere. However the current level is already at 380ppm, but we need to get below 350ppm really quickly to get last century’s favourable weather patterns back, preferably before Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice has slipped into the sea and the enormous amounts of frozen methane are released from the permafrost.
Now lets take a look at Concentrating Solar Power plants. Depending on whose calculations you want to believe and where the plants are built, CSP has an EROEI ratio of about 30:1 to 70:1 over its life time of about 30 to 40 years. So lets assume an average EROEI of about 50:1 with an average life time of 33 years and 4 months. This would mean that CSP generates the energy it takes to build, install and operate in only 8 months, within 16 months we could have doubled our installation, and within 24 months we could quadruple our installation.
If we started out with a modest 50MW plant, within only 14 years we could build enough CSP power generation capacity to power all of humanity. Of course in reality there would likely be other factors limitingthe rate at which CSP could be up-scaled, meaning that not all of the CSP power would be used to build new plants. So we would use the surplus CSP power to reduce the use of fossil energy sources.
Some of these other limiting factors might be available capital, available numbers of engineers and skilled workers, transmission line capacity, construction materials, etc.
By Mike Roddy on Mar 5, 2009
Mojave residents need to take one for the team here, though care should be exercised in choosing the sites- Ivanpah was probably a bad choice.
Solar thermal is the best single technology on the horizon to save the planet. Rooftops and Germany? Oh, the Germans just ordered 26 new coal plants. If we keep building them, the Mojave will be destroyed as an ecosystem as a result of global warming.
It’s not millions of acres, either. 100,000 megawatts, a huge goal, would take up 5-600,000 acres. A lot, yes, but the Mojave/Colorado/Chihahua deserts in the Southwest must be at least 30 million acres. Meanwhile, we have destroyed 90% of our ancient forests in order to build out of two by fours- a much sillier practice, and destructive of a lot more wildlife, too.
By Larry Hogue on Mar 9, 2009
Hi Julian,
Thanks for your comment. As you know, I e-mailed you after it appeared for sources on your claims about the weak Energy Return On Energy Invested ratio. Still hoping to hear back from you. I also see that you posted this comment as a post on your blog, still with no sources cited. Unfortunately, your blog does not allow comments.
In the meantime, I did some research of my own into the issue of how much energy it takes to manufacture, transport, and install solar panels. Here’s what I found:
The U.S. Dept. of Energy’s website states that all resources going into PV can be earned back in 1 to 2 years (the number was recently lowered). Our Dept. of Energy uses the term Energy payback time (EPBT).
The idea that PV uses more energy than it produces seems to be an old canard passed around by the concentrating solar and other industries. There are also some folks with Ph.D.s and positions at elite universities who are hell bent on proving that PV can’t work from a variety of abstract points of view (I call them “PV deniers”).
If you can show us new research that supports the numbers you give, I’d appreciate it. Also the sources for the CSP EROEI.
By the way, did you know that one of the simplest ways for the United States to make an immediate 20% cut in its energy related carbon footprint would be to power up all the currently idle natural gas combined cycle plants, and shut down a like capacity of coal-fired power plants? This is contained in a presentation Bill Powers made at a recent conference, and the power point from that presentation is available here.
As you probably know, there’s a push to get the plant that powers the nation’s capital to convert from coal to natural gas, which is another option. When we’re not doing obvious things like this, it’s hard for us to accept the necessity of scraping deserts.
While waiting for you to respond to these last bits of information, I did even more research into Energy Payback Times, and found that more studies agree that PV rapidly earns back the energy used to make it and the CO2 released during its production. Most of this comes from a study out of Brookhaven National Labs:
IEEE SpectrumIEEE had an article with this quote: “Vasilis Fthenakis, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, estimated the environmental footprint of solar systems, using assumptions about the transportation distances for materials and the amounts of energy needed to produce the cells, the modules, and their electrical and electronic subsystems.”
So you can see that this study did take into account the “life-cycle costs” of PV including energy used in transport. It concluded that solar panels recover their energy inputs in 1 to 3 years, depending on the location and type of technology.
The Center for Life Cycle Analysis at Columbia University in New York has produced two simple fact sheets based on this research, which you can find here and here.
Fthenakis, Alsema and Wild-Scholten presented this paper to the 21st European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference in 2006. Its abstract contained this statement: “Thin film technologies now have energy pay-back times in the range of 1-1.5 years (S.Europe). Greenhouse gas emissions are now in the range of 25-32 g/kWh and this could decrease to 15 g/kWh in the future. Therefore PV energy systems have a very good potential as a low-carbon energy supply technology.”
And finally, here is a literature review conducted in 2006 and published in “Energy Bulletin.” It found that the Energy Payback Time for a typical polycrystalline home installation was around 4 years. This is a publication that had once agreed with the very pessimistic ratios you quote for PV, but by 2006 further research had forced it to change its tune. The editors state at the end of the article: “Energy Bulletin has been guilty of overstating the point that solar PV might sometimes have an EROEI of less than one, whereas it now seems likely to us that clever investments in solar PV are a very good idea.”
While the idea that photovoltaics use more energy than they produce may once have been true, all of this more recent evidence from authoritative sources shows that it’s time to put this idea to rest.
Again, if you have info that’s more up-to-date than this, and from equally autoritative sources, please send it, either directly to me by e-mail or as a comment on this post.
By Larry Hogue on Mar 9, 2009
I had a little problem with the link to Bill Powers slide presentation. Here’s another try.
By Larry Hogue on Mar 9, 2009
Mr. Roddy,
Thanks for your comment. Your implication that we’ve destroyed the forest, so now it’s time to destroy the deserts is amusing, if not alarming.
We agree that clearcutting ninety percent of our forests to provide lumber for wasteful construction practices is silly, and we could apply many more pejorative terms to it. Likewise, removing mountaintops to produce coal is criminal. But we adhere to the simple principle that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
We believe it is equally silly to scrape deserts for large-scale solar plants while better alternatives exist, such as the no-brainer of shutting down coal-fired power plants and turning on all of the natural gas-fired power plants in this country that are currently moth-balled. Or the slightly more brain-intensive alternative of covering all of our roofs and parking lots with photovoltaic panels.
We agree with you in your statement about the Ivanpah project, if you were to remove the qualifier “probably.” This is simply the wrong place for an industrial facility of any kind, given the fact that it provides good habitat for the desert tortoise (the Mojave resident that will be “taking one for the team” as you put it). Only government agencies’ undue concern for BrightSource Energy’s bottom line has kept them from forcing a serious study of a private, degraded lands alternative for this project. We think BrightSource needs to “take one for the team” and move its project to Daggett. It should be at least as expensive for this company to lease our public land as it is to lease privately owned land.
We find your numbers suspect. You seem to assume that Concentrating Solar only requires 6 acres per megawatt, when the reality is more like 10 acres/MW. (Ivanpah – 400 megawatts impacting 4000 acres, per the Energy Commission’s staff assessment.) So yes, 100,000 megawatts would work out to over a million acres scraped.
Your statement about rooftop solar in Germany is a non sequitur. That country has already installed around 10,000 megawatts of rooftop solar. According to numbers produced by the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative, we need about 27,000 megawatts of renewable energy in California (assuming a 25 percent capacity factor) to reach our state’s 33% renewable energy goal. So, if California had enacted a feed-in tariff at the same time as Germany, it’s reasonable to assume we’d already be a third of the way to our goal, with rooftop PV alone. If we matched what Germany is now installing each year — 1500 megawatts — we’d cover the remaining 2/3 of the distance to that goal by 2020, again on PV alone.
As Bill Powers has shown, we probably need less power overall than RETI projects, so even if we started right now with a serious PV program, we could get a very long distance toward the 33% goal by 2020 with rooftop solar. This reduces considerably the urgency with which we have to move toward concentrating solar and other remote, large scale renewables.
Your skepticism over PV is undermined by the very large PV installations that now threaten deserts and other areas. See my previous comment on this post for more on why your skepticism about PV is not merited.
Our point of view is that, if you can put solar on a rooftop, why scrape the desert? It should always be more expensive to destroy habitat than to install a solar panel on a roof, and this starts with the very low rates BLM charges to lease public land.
By Michael Keenan on Mar 23, 2009
If I am not mistaken or deceived didn’t the CPUC lawyers and Arnold argue against Proposition 7 , the solar initiative, that proponents would “fast-tract” projects and harm the “environment.”
The Holding Utility Companies and Arnold wanted Californians to think they where doing us a favor by derailing the so-called fast tracking environmental destroyers of Prop 7. Little did they want us to know that California’s ISO was already given the green light on all the queued up energy projects that have ALREADY been fast-tracked for the last two years by both state and federal directives that circumvent our Congress and California political bodies.
This was the part of deception by the anti-7 factions whom are busily fast-tracking even more now since Arnold went and egged them on. In a January 5th memo to Obama, the Gov asks to “Waive or greatly streamline National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) requirements consistent with our statutory proposals to modify the California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) for transportation projects.” The truth is it is not just transportation, but the desert and delta projects too. The economic downtrun argument is just flat out pretense. And now comes Holding Company Shill, Congressman Brian Bilbray, who has no pretenses and flat out calls now for no EIR whatever. Hey Bill just where will all the water come from to keep clean and maintain all these panels? I’m just a window cleaner but that would be my first EIR question.
How about hiring more people to undertake the EIR process to help pick up the pace instead dear Bill? Lets make up for the underfunding and catch up at the same time? While a pleasant surprise to see Senator Feinstein to weigh in on this issue the funding for proper EIR’s needs greater diligence.
This course of Arnold’s “streamlining” of the CEQA process has put him up there possibly now with Kempthorne and his gutting of the Endangered Species Act. Will the Natural Community Conservation Planning called for really protect the desert? What if a species range is in both fed and state properties? Are both state and the feds off the ESA hook now? And what a shame that the Nature Conservancy may have fronted for this.
So what is the real purpose of this classic bait and switch. How is it the Arnold could be so hypocritical post prop 7’s defeat? Because the Holding Company Utilities and Arnold do not want to share in the investors pie. Neither the Solar pie, the Wind pie, nor the Geothermal pie or the Coal pie too and all the Commodities that seem to be all that is left of our natural resources.
Get in now after all taxpayers are footing the bill for the the Sunrise Transmission line so why not take advantage of nabob Chairman CPUC Peevy’s call for this boondoggle against his staff recommendations. On federal land there are no royalties and rent is supposed to be in full only after three years of project operation. I checked and the historic rent has been increased 20 % already since I checked last month. So much for “historic.” What a fleece.
The grander scale of this is an attempt by “financialized” unregulated Holding Utitlity companies to lockout even the California home owners from their rooftops and solar easements and from getting their own solar payments and make them pay for the transmission too boot. Matter of fact just what does the state get in return for use of state lands? I mean why change the goal post for Renewable Energy Credits now Gov?
Second of all why change the goal from 20% to 33% without first asking why the Governor failed to make the first goal which stands around 10.6. SCE CEO Bryson has already said the utilities would not make this target before he even retired. The solar incidence on the rooftops of California residents could easily cover this 9.4 shortfall in Renewable Energy Credits. I would as a home owner with some front end help go solar and sell all my excess to the Utilities and let them have the Rec’s if it would at all help reach the current target 2010 goal of 20%. And stop the postponing of carbon reductions.
So please Governor one target at a time if you will. And no scrimping on a full EIR process anywhere on any property. After all what is the point of having a State and Governor if there is going to be by all likelihood nothing left to protect or defend. Climatologist Jim Hanson has already called this kind of delay a crime against humanity.
I am not deceived like Mr. Billbray. It is high time to cook the Big Bad Wolf with our own roof top energy. The German’s have the right recipe.
I am Citizen Michael John Keenan
http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/Published/Report/88422.htm
http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/press-release/11073/
By Larry Hogue on Mar 23, 2009
Michael,
Thanks for your comment. We always enjoy a good rant. Not sure about your statements re: Prop 7 and the Nature Conservancy, but we certainly support a strong Feed-In Tariff for solar power producers of all sizes.
By Michael Keenan on Mar 26, 2009
It is not a rant. It is based on public documents that show a bias by the Governor to HOLDING companies that are trying to kick the Ship High In Transit out of you and your friends and steal public resources.
A month after Proposition 7 went down the Gov used the Climate change argument to change the utilities goal from 20% by 2010 to 35% by 2015 band and then turned around and argued FOR fast-tracking solar projects and eliminating ESA or EIRs under CEQA. And the Nature Conservancy went along with it. The Nature Conservancy SHOULD call for Salazar to repeal Bushes ESA directives within 60 days of Omni Bills passage or by May 6th and stop playing the corporate shill like Bilbray or the Governor.
By Judith on Apr 3, 2009
I read all these comments and just want to state that My husband and I live in a rural area and have put in a solar hot water system and wanted to do more. We applied to have a wind turbine as we strongly believe in “distributed generation”. It is the only thing that makes sense. We have no neighbors and even if we did it would be so far away from any house that it will bother no one. However, we have been waiting for 6 months for the permit to be approved by the San Diego County Officials. Even though many of these have already been installed in a denser area of Borrego Springs all of the sudden they want the installer to start over. The agent for the County has decided to reject the sound report as perhaps he does not have enough to do since the housing down turn. This the opinion of the installer.There have been two sound tests, one paid for by taxpayers, and the other privately by the installer. This is the “support” for projects you can expect, and at this rate we will never get anywhere. I have written letters to the city council to no avail. The installer may have to get a lawyer to straighten this guys attitude out. He asks for something and is given it, then rejects that and asks for something else, even highly irregular and actually illegal requests . The County is famous for creating its own red tape. I fought the Sunrise Powerlink for three years as I strongly believe in the Bill Powers report, and vowed to become my own power producer, and so far all I have is a stonewall. In a very short time PV will be rolled out at 10 cents a KW and will become affordable for all rooftops. This new technology also will be more efficient in that it need not be aimed at the sun as it will pick up from all angles. If we don’t do something about this permitting process for homeowners nothing will happen. Individuals can change our future without gutting our beautiful deserts and wilderness. The world is getting smaller and we need some common sense.