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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.