Can we please, once and for all, stop decrying solar energy for being too area-intensive? See, for example, the oft-cited statistic that to power its economy, the U.S. would need "10 billion meters, squared, of land." America isn't exactly short on square meters, and awfully sunny ones at that. But 10 billion square meters sounds a lot bigger than it really is.
10,000 square kilometers (100km x 100km) form a square you could drive around entirely, at legal highway speeds, in four hours. (Less if you speed.) 10,000 square kilometers is also roughly one-fortieth the area that the human species has already occupied for hydroelectric reservoirs -- all to produce, according to the IEA, 15 percent of current global electricity demand. (This certainly overstates the efficiency of large dams, which do not produce 100 percent of the world's hydroelectric power.)
Get that? For vastly less space than we already consume for the pittance we get from hydroelectric dams, we could power the world. Space is not the limiting factor -- and soon enough, cost won't be either. Which will leave mulish stupidity the remaining roadblock.
SolarCity makes electric cars an even smarter investment
Comments
View as Flat
Delay And Deny Posted 8:44 am
05 Jun 2007
This more than anything shows the paradoxical mindbendingness of Grist editors.
Global Warming is
(a) A movie by Al Gore
(b) A reason for celebrities to wear little ribbons
(c) Increased solar energy falling on, and/or being retained by the Earth.
If you answered (c), then you might be on the road to understanding.
The irony is that while these articles "search for alternative energy", the whole point of Global Warming is that we not have more of it at our disposal (from whatever cause you choose to assign it to)!
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:57 am
05 Jun 2007
http://greyfalcon.net/ethanol.png
If solar isn't good enough, then there's no way in hell that biofuels are going to be good enough.
_
Not entirely related, but asside from the Resident Evil styling this is a pretty good quick reference on US electricity.
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/eoe/energy.asp
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sunflower Posted 9:16 am
05 Jun 2007
And of course it would not be in one location, And not just deserts. There will be single collectors at homes with yards. There will be fields of hundreds of thousands supplying power, heat, and cooling to whole cities.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0705/gallery.sol ...
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:54 am
05 Jun 2007
http://blogs.business2.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/3 ...
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sunflower Posted 10:38 am
05 Jun 2007
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0705/gallery.sol ...
Most likely to succeed
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/about.htm
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SustainableGreen Posted 11:37 am
05 Jun 2007
What MUST be killed is this ignorant assumption that LAND must be covered! Please for GAWD's sake, look down on some rooftops--huge, empty, heat-emitting/sunlight-absorbing expanses of seldom-used space going to waste! Put PV on the goddam roof! Covering up land--anywhere--is sheer ignorance and damages terrestrial ecosystems. I would oppose any PV being placed on virtually any land area. Doing so would be as stupid and ignorant as me taking my own PV off my own roof, and covering the yard.
We have to end this stupid stupid stupid notion that sustainability has to be in the hands of some electric utility, or IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! Why does this mentality of 'electricity as commodity' persist? Is everyone a shill for $ mega-million electricity providers, to continually reinforce this mentality? Will SOMEONE answer this?--when millions of people can make their own electricity on THEIR OWN ROOF!
Distributed generation of electricity on millions of roofs: residential, business, warehouse, schools, shopping goddam malls, is a simple sustainable energy solution.
THIS is the archaic, 19th Century, industry-induced, society-blind-to, meme that must be killed!
PUT THE PV ON THE ROOF!
David
Sustainability For Life
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!
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spaceshaper Posted 12:02 pm
05 Jun 2007
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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sunflower Posted 12:10 pm
05 Jun 2007
Rooftop pv costs about $1000/m2. More advanced ground-based tracking solar has two to three times the performance of rooftop pv and costs less than $200/m2 (10 to 15 times cheaper energy). If you want China and India to follow then think about return on investment, energy metrics, and carbon metrics (money).
When distributed like trees, then solar land intensity is about 900 m2/acre and delivers about 900 barrels of oil equivalent per year per acre in sunny climates. If that land costs $9,000/acre then land is 5% the cost of the installation. Further, there is no way we can displace the carbon emissions of our society with the space of city roofs.
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John McGrath Posted 12:47 pm
05 Jun 2007
Um, a blog post need not be a monograph. I'm totally with you on the decentralized solar power in the hands of the people thing. My point -- limited only to the issue of surface area -- is that our energy system is already incredibly area-intensive, and to single out solar for criticism is irrational.
Oh, and I asked the editors to change ("100km^2 by 100km^2") to 100km by 100km. Typo was not corrected before I posted.
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SustainableGreen Posted 1:46 pm
05 Jun 2007
Hey, Spaceshaper: I appreciate your concern. My blood pressure is actually quite good, so no worries. And speaking of blood pressure, I just told a secret on another thread that Big Pharma would kill to prevent knowledge of, but does everyone know that celery contains a compound that lowers blood pressure? 3-n-Butyl phthalide--pass it on! And yeah, I know, the drama, but this issue of covering land is something dredged up I think from the depths of the soulless electricity utility industry. Your remonstration is noted.
Gee, Sunflower, I have enjoyed many messages from you, but you could not be more wrong here. "PV [is for the] rich....?" [My edit] While I would be the last person to maintain PV is cheap to purchase and install, once installed it begins paying for itself immediately, and on the order of 2-20 years, depending on many factors. The costs compare roughly to a moderately priced current model vehicle. Compare that return on investment between a vehicle and PV.
And let's see, since I live with PV and Wind I must be rich--right? Wrong!!! E.g., do you know many rich people who walk outside and get the chicken eggs each day--do you know many rich people who raise at least some of their own produce? And get their own hands dirty doing it? How many rich people are contractors doing prescribed burns, sometimes driving a tractor to prepare burn lines? How many rich wildlife biologists who have worked for government do you know? Got any phone numbers?
$1000/m^2? Maybe from one of the hangouts of the rich, perhaps, but not where most of us shop. If this is the price they paid, they may not be rich for long, because someone will put a secret mark on their doors, and someone will poke their eyes and swindle them out of the rest of their money! You should check your sources or your math--or both. The current cost per Watt for PV retail is $4-5.
Distributed PV is egalitarian, brownout- and power failure-proof, pokes the Corporate Oligarchy in the eye, is highly terrorism resistant, recovers its costs in 2-20 years and will last over 30 years. As such, since it is so effective it is actually a very good investment, and if incentives from states and utilities were increased to meaningful, useful levels, a great many middle-class citizens could afford it, thus in fact greatly reducing Carbon production. Furthermore, since the poor uses less energy per capita than the rich, it is a very good investment to provide to them.
Sounds like there is another meme on the chopping block. Some memes are innocuous, some may be genuinely good, but many simple reflect the ignorance of those who repeat and perhaps perpetuate them. They can even stall progress. When fraudulently created by selfish interests, it would be they are the rich we should not trust.
Okay--lead by example--my home has rooftop water collection, solar domestic water heat, and together with the PV and Wind is ~95% Carbon-neutral. Lead by example--what can yours do?
David
Sustainability For Life
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!
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sunflower Posted 2:51 pm
05 Jun 2007
I traveled the world and provincial N. Americans have no concept of the poverty of the developing world. I've studied the economics of solar energy for 30 years. My passive solar home is 100% dead carbon free (after construction) and has a 500 year life expectancy.
My mission is to find the least-cost forms of solar energy that can scale globally to trillions of dollars. Flat plate pv is on the opposite side of that. PV is handy, easy, convenient, political, inefficient, and expensive. PV gives hope. PV will not displace coal in India and China.
Solar energy can supply humanity's energy. Economics is the path finder. Materials intensity is most important. Land intensity is not a barrier.
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sunflower Posted 2:58 pm
05 Jun 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 3:11 pm
05 Jun 2007
Tell me one thing though, wouldn't it be cool if there was low-cost PV technology you didn't even need any grants, tax shelters, or price supports? Seems like the PV compounds have some pretty expensive goodies in them. What is that, like DoD strategic metals or something?
A few turkeys have been experimenting with solar aggregators and they say they can melt rocks. I think they want to boil water for turbines but I'm not sure. I saw a few links right here on the Grist. Anyway, it sounds cool ... I mean very, very hot. Lord knows how many ants I burned up just with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.
Thanks John McGrath,
/sammie
Onward through the fog
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sunflower Posted 3:23 pm
05 Jun 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 5:34 pm
05 Jun 2007
You forgot one important point. All the solar that is needed can go on roofs and over parking lots and even over highways. So actually solar has a zero footprint. It only takes space already used by human habitation.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 8:17 pm
05 Jun 2007
David is absolutely right to worry about terrestrial ecosystems, including those in the various kinds of desert. We have a prejudice against arid land, and take it for granted that it is more or less dead, hence it can be used for all kinds of human experimentation and fun, such as vehicle-racing, movie-shooting, suburb-building and nuclear-weapons-testing, without the slightest moral qualm.
Unfortunately, this prejudice has deep roots in the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament: the parched, arid land where human beings cannot live is cursed by God, and associated with sin, demons and divine displeasure; the sign of God's pleasure is the well-watered place where many plants flourish.
But in fact, arid ecosystems are full of living beings, well-adapted to surviving there. They would rather stay there, than move to a wetter environment.
So, when we talk about power generated by solar energy, and principally have in mind arrays of photovoltaic panels, and have in mind as well erecting them in desert plains in the Southwest, we need to consider what the environmental cost of the initial intrusion would be, then what the environmental cost of the installed arrays would be.
Remember what happened on the North Slope of Alaska. The tundra is flat, and is the home of many small mammals and ground-dwelling birds. And so it had been for ages; but then the oil people moved in. They will claim that they did not disturb much of the surface at all, which may be true, proportionally. But they erected a number of structures, such as poles, signs, markers, the pipeline itself, a few feet above the surface of the tundra. Before long, predatory birds, i.e. corvids and raptors, who previously had been scarce, found they could perch on these structures, and from those vantagepoints look out for potential prey. Thus, even if the pipeline does not itself directly harm small terrestrial animals, nevertheless its presence, with all the accompanying superstructure, has indeed introduced dangerous elements, previously very rare.
Similarly, the creation of large areas of shaded land in the desert may attract predators who might otherwise have rarely or never passed there.
And that is just one of many environmental considerations, regarding the hypothetical creation of solar panel arrays in undeveloped desert land.
Thomas Friedman, in his NYT op-ed on Sunday, suggested the creation of a green grid, so that electricity generated from solar energy in Arizona, and from wind energy in Wyoming, might provide power to homes in Chicago. (His examples, as I recall.) It sounds good. But whatever he has in mind for Arizona (and in a different way for Wyoming) needs to be studied very carefully, with great consideration for the local ecosystems.
Really, though, I do not see why it cannot be made a priority for us in cities to greenify our rooves, in one way or another, including by installing solar pv panels. The papal engineers in the Vatican are showing the way, apparently, or rather, are leaping into the wave.
PS: Of course I cannot follow what my prophet Sunflower means, when he compares costs for different methods of collecting solar energy. That is way over my head. No doubt he knows what he is talking about. I trust him implicitly. : )
PPS: And also of course, setting small critters ablaze, or boiling them from within, with magnifying lenses is not nice. In the case of ants, on the other hand, they are hardly individuals, are they. But perhaps they are: they struggle to escape, don't they? In any case, let us not encourage our children to think there is nothing morally objectionable about engaging in such experimentation.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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amazingdrx Posted 10:35 pm
05 Jun 2007
Now on the other thread, Gar has calculated only 50 square miles of resevoir would store enough hydro power, via pumping up with wind or solar electric power, to run the grid with hydroelectric when wind and solar wane.
That can have zero footprint also. Or maybe even a positive eco footprint? How in the world?
Because water for the storage can come from restored wetlands holding and cleaning flood waters. That saves water! A huge positive in a drought stricken, flood stricken land due to GHG climate problems.
We are getting really close here to symbiotic energy solutions that are a conservationist's dream. Reasons to increase wetlands and restore prairies (for wind farms) and all with positive environmental footprints, rather than desert destroying fields of solar farms.
I think our green friendly politicians can not only back these sorts of plans, but actually gain votes with them!! Who says bloggerel is a waste of time? Hehehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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joanium Posted 11:01 pm
05 Jun 2007
People seem to regularly talk about the unviability of renewables because they can't (for some reason or another) supply all the energy we use.
There are two components, surely.
Reduce the energy we use.
Supply the balance with low impact energy.
Meet somewhere in the middle -- reduce consumption, increase renewables supply!
I'd be concerned if we expected PVs had to feed the US's current energy demand. I'm optimistically hoping that we can be clever about energy demand reduction, as well as dealing with the supply side issues!
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:49 pm
05 Jun 2007
http://www.zmetro.com/photos/2006/09/pvethanol.gif
http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/images/image1.gif
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:26 am
06 Jun 2007
Add to that Sunflower's example of home heating and you can see that answers are at our finger tips.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreyFlcn Posted 12:32 am
06 Jun 2007
And then just swap them out like duracells.
Zero downtime.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:48 am
06 Jun 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:01 am
06 Jun 2007
I don't have a citation, but I could have sworn I've seen an EPRI PHEV presentation which mentioned that the energy demand for transportation is about 10x larger than the energy demand for electricity.
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SustainableGreen Posted 1:04 am
06 Jun 2007
That is a very good perspective, BioD. I had tried to find a calculated value for the amount of area occupied by rooftops in the U.S., as a maximum potential area, but have not been able to, but if you squint your eyes while looking at the appropriate squared area you can imagine it dispersed across the the country on rooftops everywhere. The individual pixels representing even large urban areas would just about get lost on the screen.
I will acknowledge that once our friend Sunflower clarified that being "rich" was based on a global spectrum, he/she is right--we are all rich. But I will point out that while PV is not the 'be all/end all', it is a big part of the cumulative progress we all need to make to achieve the reductions we all need--again leading by example. The vast majority of the burden is properly on us.
We are losing habitat globally and locally everywhere you look. What is left has far greater value by default and is the wrong place to deploy direct solar energy collection devices of any kind, given that they require area, and the available unused area already taken out of productive biotic function. If we do this, as has been pointed, there would be zero net loss of land area for solar. I am extremely protective of my desert, and the sandhills, and the woods, and the grasslands. We have to change our approach entirely, and consider the full spectrum of consequences of our actions. This is an extremely important aspect of sustainability. The bar is high.
I have had a problem for a long time with the mentality, which seems very good at perpetuating itself, that electricity is only something that only someone else can make and you have to buy. This "electricity as commodity" mentality I suppose would qualify as a meme, since it reinforces itself efficiently, is selfish, with little external value, and has had a lifetime of several human generations. How about we render this one extinct, too? In fact, the meme of the topic of the thread and this one are related and maybe even mutually dependent and reinforcing. Can memes "have each others' backs"?
Just like Sunflower, I will retire at this point. Best regards to all.
David
Sustainability For Life
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:20 am
06 Jun 2007
http://www.zmetro.com/photos/2006/09/pvethanol.gif
They are a close match for solar although the corn ethanol area's don't match. One is for 50% transport, the other for 100%. I have not run numbers to verify either graphic so...
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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spaceshaper Posted 3:17 am
06 Jun 2007
10 billion meters, squared, is not the same as ten billion square meters. The latter is indeed the area of a square 100 km x 100km. The former is the area of a square 10 million km x 10 million km, which you could certainly not drive around in four hours unless you were traveling at considerably more than highway speeds, legal or otherwise. I am not familiar with the "oft-cited statistic" but the smaller number certainly seems more plausible.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Solar John Posted 3:52 am
06 Jun 2007
http://solarjohn.blogspot.com
Jhn
Solar John
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GRLCowan Posted 6:33 am
06 Jun 2007
Times 10^14 cm^2 times 4.184 J/cal times ten percent conversion divided by 31 days, that makes 180 GW.
Far from powering the US economy, this would not cover even all of of its electricity needs, plus, there might be clouds.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:54 am
06 Jun 2007
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sunflower Posted 7:16 am
06 Jun 2007
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Nucbuddy Posted 7:41 am
06 Jun 2007
Passive-solar only seems enticing to the power-impoverished. Scaling our electrical-power bandwidth by merely 1,000-fold would, I don't doubt, make passive-solar seem irrelevant.
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sunflower Posted 7:53 am
06 Jun 2007
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Nucbuddy Posted 8:27 am
06 Jun 2007
Passive solar energy is not free, if the solar rights are not free and if the mines that are required to mine the solar ore are not free. If you pay for all of that in advance, and you get lucky, it is free -- in the same way that buying a lifetime-supply of cars, car-maintenance, car-repairs, and gasoline in advance, and getting lucky, would make driving free.
Have you ever wondered, Sunflower, why remote land in Alaska is so cheap, when land sells for $1 million/acre on the California coast? Is it because passive solar energy is free?
google.com/search?q=california+climate+%22real+estate+prices%22
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:34 am
06 Jun 2007
Me either, but atleast I know where mine came from :P
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/E85vWindSol
http://greyfalcon.net/ethanol3
_
I do know however that the Tesla one uses concentrating solar at 35%
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog2/index.php?p=25&
Also yours uses 2001 data.
_
Now on that same topic of Comparing Tesla's numbers. I've seen differing numbers for electric cars versus hydrogen.
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen.png
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen4.png
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amazingdrx Posted 10:31 pm
06 Jun 2007
With conservation (especially geothermal heating/cooling for buildings)and 39% efficient solar, instead of the typical 10%, from 10 sun concentrating solar PV (NREL verifies that), and PV over parking lots as well, solar PV could supply enough power for everything plus plugin vehicles.
Of course there is also wind, wave, water power, and biogas fuel cell/turbine backup.
How anyone could claim renewables can't do the whole energy job? They don't know the facts and/or don't want to know them.
let's face it, in terms of this energy revolution, this blog rules! Great hybrid bike info thanks to bio-d and really great graphical analysis too from falcon. How can we lose this battle?
By not getting involved in local politics and making our reps in DC listen to these facts! Organize, join your local democratic party. Make the machine respond!!
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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