Lester, you say it like it's a good thing.

Those massive solar plants chew up huge tracts of precious wildland, cropland -- and wreck the scenery. 'Desert' is just the bullshitter's term for fragile, biodiverse, precious wildland that just happens to be arid.

We already have zillions of square miles of open rooftops, just waiting for solar panels. Why aren't you promoting their use?

If this post is any indication of the Earth Policy Institute's understanding of basic ecology then you guys clearly need to go back to college.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

"Texas will have 45,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 45 coal-fired power plants)."

Yes Lester!  Great to see you here on Grist!

That reminds me of McCain's call for 45 new nuclear plants.  Use wind instead.  At a fraction of the cost, ongoing right now, rather than 30 years from now, as the nukes would take to complete.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Making clean energy cheaper than energy from fossil fuels is the ticket to halting global warming.  
Producing enough clean energy to meet all US needs, will help lower the price of clean energy technology that we sell to other countries. Then  they can stop burning fossil fuels also, develop vibrant urban areas and productive farmland,and  preserve the remaining rainforests.
A world population, stabilized by universal access to affordable family planning and plentiful clean energy, can create a sustainable 21st century economy.
 

Whikerfish, the 12 sq. mile figure is most certainly not an indication of contiguous develoment. And while I am concerned about cryptobiotic soil death and water consumption, I'm willing to trust but verify--to borrow a phrase from Mr. Raygun--in order to quickly get us away from our carbon generation addiction. Which addiction BTW, and its' concomitant economic strain on American residenctial, commercial, and industrial users the coal, natural gas and the coal-fired electrical gen cos. are eager to maintain. I am, however, right with you on the NEED for the average person--home or business owner--to have the ability and resources to install PV gen capacity on their own residences and facilities. Why must we continue this reliance on centrally-sourced power gen--renewable or otherwise--that these el gen cos. have built up for the last 125 yrs? We neddn't. The quicker we get Americans the ability to gen their own power--at least to a certain degree--the quicker we can break the stranglehold these one-trick corp. ponies have over us.

The mellotron is your friend.

Whiskerfish,

IMHO creating some shade with solar panels is far less harmful to the environment than coal mining, especially MRT coal mining, is.  And yes, a roof is a great place for a solar panel, but other than that I find your comments absurd.  

Solar John

All in all a good article. I have to reply to BILL HANNAHAN's comment:

"Intermittent sources won't work when we really run out of fossil fuel."

I am so weary of hearing this argument against wind and solar. Yes, if we were to turn off our base-load power plants tomorrow, we'd have an issue. For now, we don't, and every kWh we make from wind and solar means a kWh that isn't produced from fossil fuels. I don't think you'll find a sane person on this site who is advocating that we turn off every coal and nuclear power plant tomorrow, but certainly around the time our renewable supply matches our electricity demand, we'll have energy storage mastered (and therefore, we'll have solved the problem of intermittent power production from wind, solar, wave, etc.). I'd like to see storage installed both at the power plants and on-site for customers-- we'll see how that evolves.

Thanks for pointing tht out, BioD.  Must have been thrown off by the hamsters.

Solar John

creating these vast solar PV arrays is not a matter of making some shade. It is a matter of ploughing up a vast area (as if you were preparing to asphalt it) and then covering it in contiguous square miles of panels and access roads.

It's little better for the local ecosystem than just concreting it over. (A very little.) Quite frankly, you speak with the casual ignorance of someone who's never been to a large-scale solar PV installation.

Calling an area 'desert' doesn't change the fact that valuable wild species find a home there and that people restore their sanity there, and couching the options as 'shading' (wrecking) wrecking the 'desert' (fragile arid ecosystem) vs destroying pretty mountains is nonsense: The choice is between using our largely unused rooftops vs destroying pretty mountains.

Another important point, that these single-owner large-scale arrays do nothing to further energy independence at the household level, has thankfully not been lost on readers of this forum.

Build solar roofs -- don't break our arid wildlands!

Whiskerfish

archigeek

I appreciate your response.

I think that a good indication that something is amiss here is the eagerness that State's have shown to blunt environmental requirements for these large solar arrays. Protections usually granted to rare desert turtles have been largely rescinded etc.

Just because an area gets called 'desert' by some people doesn't mean that nothing lives there. The environmental community is so obsessed with rainforest and (sometimes) other forest that the other habitats seem often to get forgotten. Savannahs, grasslands and 'deserts' all too often get ploughed up without a murmer.

We need solar PV on our rooftops -- not far away, under Enron-type companies' control.

Cheers

Whiskerfish

as a national strategy, since, if it distributed around the country, and with the help of a good HVDC grid, it can provide baseload.  The wind is always blowing somewhere, whereas the sun is only shining in the Southwest for a few hours a day.

Wind farms, as far as I can tell, have minimal environmental impact, and the access roads can be designed in an environmentally friendly way, as can, I think the transmission lines.  I wouldn't say there would be no environmental impact, but we're talking triage here, because otherwise we're talking about the destruction of all ecosystems by global warming.

I apologize for not asking Lester Brown about this in a conference call I had with him.  The water used for solar thermal plants is another problem that is not being addressed.

So it sounds to me like a national system of wind farms should be the first priority, followed by PV on roofs -- including a Federal attempt to help get costs down by guaranteeing quantity production -- and then, if necessary, some solar thermal plants.  Judging from Brown's post, the vast bulk of effort, at this point, is going into wind in any case.