Have you sometimes read people claiming solar panels can go up in a jiffy? Well, it seems this is not always true. Today, WSJ writes about difficulties encountered by those wishing to move forward with solar installations in Southern Nevada. Various companies are applying for permission to build plants on federal lands. Obama wants to encourage alternate energy sources. So this should be easy, right?
Well, no:
Patrick Putnam is a field manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in southern Nevada. His job is to help the government decide whether the dozens of solar-energy projects that companies have proposed building on federal land in his jurisdiction pose undue environmental risks.
After reviewing some applications for as long as 18 months, Mr. Putnam’s office hasn’t approved any. He says his office hopes to make decisions on at least three by the end of 2010, but that will be “a monumental task.”
Of course, we also periodically read claims that we can’t use nuclear power in the desert because it supposedly needs water. Well, guess what? Concentrated solar needs water too:
Many of the projects that the government is considering allowing on public land use a system known as concentrating solar power. These systems often require large amounts of water to cool the turbines that are used to convert the sun’s heat into electricity. Because water is scarce in many parts of the Southwest, some land managers have questioned their suitability. Most of southern Nevada’s valleys, for example, receive only four to six inches of rainfall a year.
Complicating matters, some of the proposed projects are in southwest Nevada’s Amargosa Valley, a basin near Las Vegas that is home to the endangered Devil’s Hole pupfish. The one-inch-long, iridescent blue creature was the subject of a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that restricted how much water nearby farms could pump out of the ground. The pumping lowered water levels in the pools where the pupfish lived, shrinking the species’ numbers.
I’d love alternate energy sources to bring us cheap sustainable energy. But it seems that where sunlight shines every day there tends to be little rain. For some designs water, becomes resource that limits man’s ability to tap energy available from the potential energy source. Rain does not renew the supply sufficiently quickly to avoid at least some negative ecological impacts.
Will we risk the pupfish and other species to quickly build solar plants? Or will bring solar energy on line much more slowly than some solar energy advocates suggest?
There are also some nasties involved in solar cell production. But from what I’ve read, it’s mainly people and the environment in China that is feeling those effects. It’s out of sight, out of mind over in the U.S.
Michael–
Look at the bright side. At least our unemployed won’t suffer ill-health as a consequence of green jobs making solar cells. That should save on health care costs. 🙂
CSP is a large scale implementation of solar that the power companies and investors like around here (So. Cal.). Obviously there are going to be impacts of building huge collector farms and power stations out in the desert, and the transmission lines to bring them into the cities. But hey, it’s Green Technology, right?
A small scale solution, such as installing solar cells and solar water heating lines on your rooftop, combined with improved housing design/insulation/consumption patterns, can have many of the benefits (and keep your house cooler!) without some of the disadvantages of the Big Energy approach.
I anticipate Secretary Chu will weigh in to mandate that solar panels be painted white (or at least an area “blend”) to avoid “warming” albedo changes.
Oliver–
If I lived in So. Cal, I’d install roof top solar panels in a heart beat.
But it’s still important to think about how quickly we can get Big Energy online. We are going to need some Big Energy solutions to power Big Industry though.
(BTW: It’s currently cloudy and raining here in the chicago ‘burbs. This sort of thing and winter tend to make roof top solar less attractive to individuals around here. )
lucia,
It’s true that solar in Chicago wouldn’t do a ton on a year-round basis, but then again, Big Solar somewhere else would also have to be transmitted north by power lines, and unless they are as lossless as somebody-or-other’s Miracle Gulfstream Tubes, they will drop off quite a lot before they reach the Great Lakes from … Nevada.
Wind farms have some interesting side-effects as well. The reliability and eyesore factors of wind power aside, people seem to have a notion that wind and tide are unlimited resources. I’m not sure that taking ALL (or a sizeable fraction) of available wind power at 50-150 ft. height on both coasts of the continental U.S. would be all that environmentally friendly, either. At least, it wouldn’t be fair to assume that it has NO deleterious effects.
There are several dry cooling techniques to cool power stations. Water is just the easiest and cheep way. If available …
For the Palo Verde plant west of Phoenix, they need lots of water but use effluent (treated wastewater). So it seems that water shouldn’t be a reason not to build nuclear plants. Also, many golf courses use effluent as well. This is one of the driest areas in the country and probably has among the highest density of golf courses, using something like 1M gallons of water per day each.
Solar panel payback is running at about 15 years even after big subsidies. Maybe one day…
JamesH and Ahab–
Yes. We’ve discussed no-water cooling at nuclear plants. We’ve discussed Palo Verde too. (In fact, I walked through the Palo Verde plant on a project.
Clearly there are much better uses of water in the Nevada desert:
http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/biomes/images/desert/desert_irrigation_6323_A80.jpg
Zeke (#14687)
Know where I can find the water consumption in gal/btu?
Here in California, Senator Diane Feinstein is trying to block construction of a large solar plant in the Mojave Desert:
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is urging the U.S. Department of Interior to stop processing applications for more than a dozen solar energy projects sought on Mojave Desert land that was donated to the government by a conservation group.
Feinstein, D-Calif., is preparing legislation to protect about 600,000 acres of former railroad company land deeded to the federal government. The deal was funded with $40 million raised by the Oak Glen-based Wildlands Conservancy and $18 million from a federal water and conservation fund.
Most of those solar projects are tax scams.
Take http://www.ausra.com/ as an example – I’ve been following this company for a few years now. It has always claimed that it will eventually be capable of producing base load power 24/7 and, with enough plants in the desert and using DC power transference, could power the whole of the US.
Pretty amazing claim so what have they achieved?
well they’ve built a factory that can produce the reflector panels efficiently and cheaply.
They’ve now built their first power station and even got Arni to open it. But it’s only 5mW!! equivalent to 2 wind generators and there’s no mention of the 24/7 scam.
Nah – it’s all a tax dodge!
I have observed many, many times how environmentalists have exploited the legal system to delay or stop projects they find objectionable. The standard operating procedure to stop a project is to find some (sub)species and use the Endangered Species Act to add insurmountable additional costs or design constraints. This must be a karmic payback when an uber-environmental alternative energy project is being delayed by the same laws. Payback is a bitch.
Perhaps now would be a good time to suggest a rewrite of the ESA.
Wind power is running into problems getting enough turbines to meet demand (or had been some months ago according to something I read on the net..). You can’t make turbines without factorys and skilled workers to work in those factories, and at the moment we don’t have enough to meet the demand.
Capacity to install enough wind or solar to make a difference doesn’t happen overnight. Some in the environmental movement have complained that we haven’t done anything meaningful to adress emissions, and that efforts such as Kyoto have been a waste of time.
And yes emissions have increased significantly. But wind and solar energy has grown in leaps and bounds. But from a base of neglibable, it has still only grown to 1% of world power. From a raw emissions point of view this is nothing; it just cancels out growth for a few months or a year or so.
However growth in the last few years has been 30% a year. This represents advances in manufacturing capability, skilled labour supply, in technology, and cost reduction. If we can keep up a growth rate of around 10 or 15% a year, this would enable us to reach 100% of world power within about 50 years.
Of course later in this 50 year period we will have to solve hard problems such as variable wind and sunshine, and added expense of decommisioning fossil fuel supplies before their natural end of life span. But within a couple decades we will either have a few decades more of climae change, and so a lot more motivation to tackle these problems, or we’ll have some convincing evidence that climate change isn’t as bad as our current best estimates, and the knowledge that we can take the added time.
And on pupfish and any other species surviving in such a limited range that building a few solar plants could endanger it, if AGW does what is expected, then wouldn’t every such species go extinct anyway?
Michael Hauber (Comment#14697)
June 16th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I guess the demand is not unlimited.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/28/vestas-wind-turbine-factory-close
Michael Hauber,
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The problem with windturbines is more than skilled workers:
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“A single three-megawatt wind generator (modest, as utility-scale wind turbines go) contains more than a ton of super magnets, more than 700 pounds of which is neodymium.”
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Neodymium is also used by hybrids and 95% of the world’s supply comes from China.
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“Having shrewdly positioned itself as the OPEC of rare earths, China is now putting the squeeze on foreign consumers, clamping down on exports by raising tariffs, lowering export quotas, and imposing production limits. Worldwide demand for rare earths is expected to grow by 10 percent a year, yet production has leveled off in recent years.”
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http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/goodbye-fossil-fuel-dependence-hello-rare-earth-dependence.php
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Given that context we should not be even looking a wind power – nevermind spending billion subsidizing it.
My solar plants just produced the first strawberries of the year. So… about two months.
😉
Alan,
I don’t have any strawberries yet. I don’t know if it’s the cold or the chipmunks.
From what I’ve managed to found on the web, it looks to me that concentrating solar plants need a fixed amount of water that is constantly recycled through the power generation process. Given the total cost of the plant, carrying the water from somewhere else shouldn’t be a big issue.
http://www.solarpaces.org/Tasks/Task1/PS10.HTM
Aden & Marjorie Meinel were the first to propose large scale solar power in Power for the People, McDonnell-Douglas Corporation, 1971, 280 pp. *LOC# TJ810.M44
They included canals to bring water in from the ocean, distill water and return the more brackish water. Providing power for all the USA would provide about 2/3rds of its fresh water – in the desert region that most needs it.
In their last installation, LUZ demonstrated actual installation rate of 100 MW scale power plants in about 9 months.
Thus environmentalists are causing major delays and increases in the cost of electricity and fuel. That directly causes higher unemployment.
Probably time to break out the tartar sauce.
Boris… Are you threatening to eat the poor little pupfish!? You ogre!
Raven (Comment#14699) June 16th, 2009 at 7:15 pm ,
I question the reliability of your source. Your typical wind turbine does not use permanent magnets and a dc generator, it uses a three phase ac alternator which does not require permanent magnets. Following the link further led to a discussion of an alternator for a wind turbine with permanent magnet bearings (Magnetic Levitation) that might significantly reduce friction, but it ‘s not at all clear that technology is cost effective. Nor does it state how much rare earth metals are required to manufacture a 3 MW generator. If you are building a generator for a wind turbine at home, then a permanent magnet dc generator using super magnets (NdFeB, e.g.) might make sense because the control electronics are much simpler.
DeWitt,
The only info I could find on wind turbine construction was DIY stuff and had no reason to believe the commercial ones would be any different. I assumed that if they are used it is for efficiency.
It is possible the numbers in the link are nonsense based on linear extrapolation of the number of magnets used in a small DIY generator.
Perhaps, the wind turbine example is a bad one but the rare earth supply issue is real. Apparently, Toyota and Honda are forced to use the back market to get the supplies they need for their hybrids.
Raven,
As long as hybrids and other EV’s use nickel/metal hydride batteries, the supply of rare earth metals used in their manufacture will be a problem . Lithium ion batteries, however, don’t have much if any rare earths used in their electrodes. They are also lighter and significantly more efficient than NIMH batteries. I have seen 66% quoted as the coulometric efficiency of NIMH batteries on charging and that doesn’t include resistive loss and overvoltage. There will be additional loss on discharge and self discharge on standing to make them even less efficient. That’s not really much of a problem for a hybrid, but it would be bad for any sort of plug in EV. Ferrari and McLaren use lithium ion batteries in their Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems in their current Formula One race cars. Lithium ion seems to be the wave of the future and the technology is improving rapidly.
Michael Huber:
You don’t need to worry about decomissioning costs for fossil power plants, since you will be needing them all to cover power requirements when the wind isn’t blowing.