The Solar Footprint: Just Another Reason It Cannot Meet Our Energy Needs and Will Do More Harm Than Good

The Pacific Research Institute has put out a report titled “The Cost of Going Green: How the Green Energy Transition Will Hurt Californians,” that is full of facts as to how solar and wind facilities are undermining California’s grid, running up the costs of energy, and otherwise hurting residents of the Golden. I highly recommend the full report, but there is one section that is particularly revealing. It's about the solar footprint, which is huge and troubling.

Here is that section:

The American Farmland Trust projects that more than 2.5 million acres of land will be “converted to utility-scale solar photovoltaics energy generation facilities across the contiguous U.S.” from 2020 to 2040. That works out to a little more than 3,900 square miles, more area than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The breakdown by land type is shown in Table 2. Converting these diverse types of land from valuable resources such as fertile farmland and turning them into solar panel fields imposes a large opportunity cost on Californians – the economic output, jobs, income, and tax revenues that could have been gained from these alternative uses is lost.

Nearly half – 49 percent – “of the solar conversion on agricultural land is projected to occur on Nationally Significant land, the nation’s best land for long-term production,” says the trust. Developers choose “high-quality farmland” to site solar arrays because “it is more likely to be flat, dry, cleared, and close to existing infrastructure.”

Forests are chosen because they act as buffers to farmland and other open spaces. But this can produce “cascading effects that remove agricultural runoff and flooding controls, reduce biodiversity and pollinator habitat, and increase pest abundances — all of which can detrimentally impact farmland.”

Trees are being cut through mass deforestation to make space for solar panels even though they absorb carbon dioxide, the gas that the environmentalists want to reduce by transitioning to renewable sources. The amount of CO2 in Massachusetts’ tree cover, for instance, is the equivalent of five years of statewide CO2-producing fossil fuel emissions.

In addition to flood-control difficulties, tree loss leaves humans vulnerable to windstorms, endangers wildlife habitats, and negatively impacts pollination. As researcher Jonathan Thompson told the Harvard Gazette,

We need to think not only about how many acres we’re using for solar development, but also which acres are being developed. Our core forests are incredibly valuable for wildlife habitat, biodiversity, and carbon storage, and we must do everything we can to protect them from further fragmentation.

Solar farms are harmful to future forests even when there’s no clear-cutting involved because the arrays block new forest growth. Natural forests cannot develop where a solar farm or “solar forest” already exists.

The open desert might appear to be the ideal location for a solar farm, but all things are not as they seem. When a solar farm is built, “the desert crust that binds soil — and absorbs carbon dioxide like a sponge — is disturbed,” says journalist Vince Bielski. This makes solar far less appealing when the goal is to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Eventually, available space will run short, not due to physical limitations but because “the easy land is gone,” says Kern County, California, Director of Planning Lorelei Oviatt. “The tolerance of local governments and local communities for hosting is gone.” While there are alternative sites, such as rooftops and “disturbed land” – “where the natural conditions and processes have been impacted by development (e.g. facilities, roads, mines, dams, aban- doned campgrounds) and/or by agricultural practices (e.g. farming, grazing, timber harvest, abandoned irrigation ditches)” – “those options are often expensive and impractical,” says John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations.

Land is not the only resource that is gobbled up by solar power sites. Enormous volumes of water are consumed in the manufacturing process. Semiconductor factories (solar arrays are packed with semiconductors), for instance, go through hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year. Furthermore, the wastewater that is produced by solar panel production is tainted by “a variety of contaminants, such as chemicals, metals, suspended solids, and organic compounds.”

Water is also needed to keep desert-based solar systems cool, as heat causes an efficiency loss, and to keep the panels clean, as well. To be fair, solar energy typically needs less water to operate than fossil fuel and nuclear power, but the amount is not zero, as some have claimed. The Las Vegas Sun has reported that “a large photovoltaic array can still easily use more water in a year than an entire residential block.”⁴⁹

Concentrating solar thermal plants are even thirstier. Solar thermal plants don’t use photovoltaic panels but mirror fields to reflect sunlight onto “power tower receivers near the center of each heliostat array,” according to the California Energy Commission’s description. The heat produces steam, which turns a turbine that produces electricity.. The Ivanpah solar thermal facility in San Bernardino County, California, just south of Las Vegas, uses a dry cooling system. But this is not uniform across the industry. Concentrated solar power can use as much as 3,500 liters of water for each megawatt hour of electricity generated, significantly more than the roughly 1,000 liters per megawatt hour consumed by modern natural gas-fired power plants.

The San Bernardino plant, just 11 years old, is an environmental menace, according to activists, and might be in line to be shut down. On roughly five square miles, and at one time the world’s largest facility of its type, it was considered to be on the cutting edge of renewable energy. But it’s been reported that it “has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies” and has “been blamed for incinerating thousands of birds.” Critics also say it’s been a threat to tortoises and rare plants. Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club calls the Ivanpah site a “financial boondoggle and environmental disaster.”

This is great information as it gets at one of the essential facts about solar; that it is extremely land-intensive in addition to be uneconomic. There is no way to meet our growing energy needs this way.

#Climate #GreenEnergy #Renewables #ClimateChange #Solar #Wind #California #SolarFootprint #PacificResearchInstitute