US government opens 22M acres of federal lands to solar
electrek.co
electrek.co
On paper, 22M acres is enough room for 1.78 TW annualised over a year[0], which is about 61% of current global electricity demand.
I doubt they'll get close to filling this land up with PV, but perhaps at least making this much available will reduce the rate at which people ask how much land PV needs to take up.
[0] 10% capacity factor, 20% efficient: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=22+million+acres+*+10%2...
"Of the ~92 million acres of corn planted in the US each year, roughly 40 million acres (1.6% of the nation’s land) are primarily used to feed cars and raise the octane of gasoline. If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States, equivalent to nearly eight times the energy that would be needed to power all of the nation’s passenger vehicles were they electrified.
However, if we were to transition this 40 million acres are of fuel to solar+food (agrivoltaics) – we could still meet 100% of our electricity needs, and power a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles."
(solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...
Hopefully for something that tastes better than corn.
If I understand right, this protest was in part due to an attempt by the (German) government to reduce the level at which farmers are being subsidised.
Reason I bring this up, is that I have heard that the US only started using corn ethanol as an excuse to keep subsidising farmers, not because it was ever a good idea.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180407183020/https://www.arb.c...
Blaming govt for water shortage despite new proactive policies like paying farmers to let fields flood (to replenish acquifiers).
No good deed goes unpunished.
There is however a special place in hell for the first person to come up with cornbread and serve it to another human being. No redeemable qualities. I’m not even sure if I would call it bread or food for that matter.
Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
I'm not talking about eating it just as corn. It's starch. It's oil. It's food component parts to use to make things humans enjoy.
Corn is everywhere and in everything. In the US at least.
there are also other crops that are better suited for starch/oil. so ultimately, to me, any use of corn other than food is basically just finding a way to subsidize the farmers. i'm not opposed to that, but if we're paying for it anyways, why not grow something better suited for purpose rather than just shoehorning corn as the solution?
Food =/= just eat the corn as is. It's an ingredient in many many many foods. That's what I'm talking about. Starch. Oil.
And no, sweet corn (food corn for humans) is not appropriate to be used as field corn for biofuel. Too high of moisture content, even when dried. It just doesn't store well.
Finally - Per acre, you will be hard pressed to find a crop that can create as many products, including starch and oil, as corn. Please let me know what you're talking about here.
If there is a year where nationwide farm output is, due to bad luck, significantly below average, we can take the crops that were going to make biofuel and use them to make cooking oil.
(IIRC farm output is always somewhat irregular, so this is a fairly plausible scenario).
If that's what's being defended against, it doesn't matter so much if it's a bit meh, it matters that you'd convinced farmers to plant the crops before they knew they'd be eaten. A government can also pay for overproduction of normal crops, but might want to reduce the cost of that by asking for a dual use crop.
I'm still not convinced doing this with corn is good, but it's at least the start of an argument that might convince me.
Also, except for emergencies, the corn wouldn't be diverted but the farmers would plant a different variety or different crop the next year.
> If this land were repurposed with solar power, it could provide around three and a half times the electricity needs of the United States
Isn't really accurate. It could never provide that, simply because solar is too intermittent. With (theoretically huuuuuge batteries) it could perhaps, but those don't exist. So it couldn't.
The batteries exist of course. Tesla ships 40GWh a year of them, and they are scaling up the next Megapack manufacturing facility in China.
So people get rich making battery factories. So what?
They've been found to:
- improve soil conditions under them
- reduce water evaporation when installed over canals etc.
- provide habitat for certain kinds of farm and wild animals (much like sunken ships provide habitat for certain marine animals)
- provide insulation for structures that have them installed on the roofs
EDIT: I just realized that Wolfram does the conversion automatically, that's really cool.
Seems like the lower numbers come from older, obsolete PV technologies. Lots of improvement since even 2015.
At the area of land we're talking about (and the location of the land), dust (or cleaning), abrasive sand, lightning and hail are all going to be an issue for the panel lifetimes, if not their efficiency.
They're mostly not in areas with tornadoes, which is nice, but I think 30 years is pretty optimistic.
Solar can supply about ten times our current needs with 1% of the surface of the Earth, a completely circular system where PV today makes PV tomorrow only has recurring costs of (1/(EROEI+1)) of the total output — x10 EROEI becomes 9% of the lifetime output of a cell being used to make the next cell.
The "eco" side pushes solar and wind for everything and thinks nuclear plants inevitably explode. The "right wing" side pushes coal exclusively because it's sad that the few thousand coal miners left could lose their jobs.
Nobody's weighing these things with fair metrics.
Nuclear power plants without passive safety features need extra redundancy on the cooling systems, e.g. you need backup generators. There is no way that should add billions of dollars to the price of the plant.
They cost billions of dollars more because competitors (primarily coal and natural gas) lobby for rules that make them cost more on purpose, because they don't want to compete with a technology that should have a similar construction cost and negligible fuel cost. Especially when they're the suppliers of the fuel.
Fortunately for them nuclear is scary and then you can lobby not just for safety measures that make sense but also for ones with poor cost benefit ratios that only serve to make the plants uneconomically expensive. Then the coal companies shrug and say the market has decided.
Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation; not all roofs are built to take extra load; and they don't have the same scale as using acres of flat ground.
I agree something seems unsatisfactory about the situation, but the reality of solar energy is getting the installation and supporting infrastructure costs as low as possible for large scale deployment.
If you want solar car parks, warehouse roofs, etc. there need to be feed-in tariffs to encourage building owners to do it.
Humans can't eat electricity though.
> Rooftops do seem like a good candidate, but they have high labor costs for installation
This seems like the problem to solve. For example, can you make some kind of modular panels simple enough to install for the property owner to do it themselves?
Open dirt is valuable because you can actually use it for something -- buildings, parks, agriculture, nature, etc.
Buildings also tend to be situated near where electricity is used, reducing distribution costs. Especially if the alternative is to use the "open dirt" which is inexpensive, and correspondingly far away from population centers and requiring long-distance transmission.
The maintenance cost is the problem to be solved. What you want is the ability for any rando with some basic tools the median homeowner has in their garage to be able to do the whole install in less than an hour, and be able to take them off and put them back on again in a similar amount of time in the event that you have to e.g. replace the roof.
We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US.
> The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.
I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do.
Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves.
And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.
Open space ("dirt") is potentially useful for tons of other uses, no point in wasting it on panels that can go on the roof.
There is a lot of unused open space way out far from cities. Electricity suffers from transmission losses, the more distance the more loss.
The ideal place to put that panel is on my roof which is just a few dozen feet from where it's going to be consumed. That'll be a lot more efficient than having it 500 miles away in the desert.
Roof solar uses a lot more labour, partly because roofs are inaccessible and need to seal, but also because roofs are smaller than fields.
A typical home solar install might take 3 guys a day to do - for maybe 6 kilowatts.
A typical field install can probably install 60 kilowatts with the same 3 guys in a day.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_03.html
You're confusing the line item called "transmission" with the concept that the electric utility's entire operations expense is in service of operating the power grid and all of that gets included in the price per kWh whenever you buy power through the grid.
A property owner who is installing their own solar and consuming the output themselves can avoid the other 56% of those costs. Which is well worth a one-time labor cost.
Comparing the efficiency of photosynthesis and photovoltaics is meaningless because they don't yield the same product.
In the real world, farm power is required for heavy equipment, battery banks, powering cell phone repeating towers on leased out land and entire paddocks are dedicated to mounting panels.
These can be ground panels (saves on mounting) or high mounts (to allow for tilt and track | animals to graze underneath)
See, for example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
It's upsetting watching millions of acres of fertile land becoming essentially salted with heavy metals.
What is really effective at energy conversion is solar to thermal. We're talking 70% efficient, zero heavy metals. If we were to put panels on buildings, it's a crying shame that they are not zero heavy metal, vastly more efficient solar thermal.
Have you visited the rust belt? When cars reach EOL, they often don't get "taken away".
Difficult to accept that people don't understand that bringing heavy metals up and putting them everywhere will ultimately result in leaching into groundwater and contamination of food and water.
Being able to deploy solar onto their land basically gives farmers a decoupled revenue stream (obviously there is -some- correlation between solar production and good/bad harvests) that doesn't necessarily tax them the same way doing crop diversity might.
Now, obviously we might wish to avoid mono-cultures for other reasons, but I think anything that can help farmers manage their risks without just resorting to more consolidation is probably a good thing as well.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=walmart+solar+fires&t=fpas&iar=new...
All the solar farms were presented as having a functional life of 25-30 years. Instead it's turning into more like 4-8, because the area gets monster thunderstorms that produce hail which wrecks the solar panels.
But that's not the full problem. The solar panels are then leaching a lot of heavy metals and chemicals. So much so that the recovered land from some of the destroyed solar panel farms is not currently suitable for farming and groundwater in the area is becoming contaminated.
They are now however building some enclosed retractable roof type buildings to house panels but protect them from hail.
> The updated roadmap... focuses on lands within 10 miles of existing or planned transmission lines and moves away from lands with sensitive resources.
And while I don't like the outcome, I like that we had the ability to challenge it. An under-appreciated aspect of corridor construction has been utilities being able to use state level regulatory capture to ram through projects that contribute to forest fragmentation.
Being able to challenge these for legitimate purposes has to be balanced against the equally legitimate problem of NIMBY obstructionism of corridor construction. But my feeling is that utilities aren't interested in a balance, they are interested pushing the NIMBY narrative to achieve a complete blank checks to circumvent environmental reviews altogether.
> Edge effects are even more complicated. They alter growing conditions within the interior of forests through drastic changes in temperature, moisture, light, and wind. Put simply, the environment of the adjacent non-forest land determines the environment of the forest fragment, particularly on its edges. This triggers a cascade of ill effects on the health, growth, and survivability of trees, flowers, ferns, and lichens and an array of secondary effects on the animals that depend on them. Ecologists suggest that true interior forest conditions – you know, where it’s hard to hear cars and lawnmowers and it remains cool, shady, and downright damp even during a three-week drought – only occur at least 200-300 feet inside the non-forest edge.
> And so a circular forest island in a sea of non-forest would have to be more than 14 acres in size to include just one acre of such interior forest condition. Put differently, reports indicate that the negative habitat effects of each residential building pocket within a forest radiate outward, affecting up to 30 additional acres with increased disturbance, predation, and competition from edge-dwellers. This may not matter to generalist species like deer, raccoons, and blue jays, which may actually benefit from fragmentation, but it is hell on interior-dependent species like salamanders, goshawks, bats, and flying squirrels. The smaller the remnant the greater the influence of external factors and edge effects. A wise person once likened it to ice cubes: the smaller ones melt faster.
Is this a big problem? Construction, sure, messy, but once it’s up it’s not really a big deal? Or is there something I am missing? It’s not like they put in a divided highway with animal-killing traffic. The vast majority of the time, it’s just going to be a long, linear clearing. Nobody there, minimal noise.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152
https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/all-energy-infrastructure-and-res...
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/fedmaps::u-s-electric-power-...
Roads are also generally worse for the environment than transmission lines.
Where do you think that power should be coming from to stop the cactus, brush and grasses from getting more shade?
It's a desert. There's arguably less biodiversity there than most places. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for there to still be plenty of cactuses and jackrabbits AND a massive amount of solar panels.
Rooftop and parking lot solar isn't the same thing. It's not automatically better. The efficiency of rooftop solar isn't nearly as good as an array that can follow the sun. Given finite resources you could make a case we're better off deploying those panels in a desert and connecting a big fat cable to them vs. a million houses all paying individual installers to install tiny, inefficient arrays piecemeal.
I thought it was well established that desert panels have to be cleaned constantly, and use huge amounts of water; without data im assuming that'll cost more than whatever efficiency gain you get from tracking panels verses non.
And parking lots just make sense -- lots store heat, cars get blistering, and solar gives power and shade...its a win win all day.
A decently balanced article on diversity in the Mojave -- https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-06-27/solar-p...
> "Global climate change will have far reaching impacts and change ecosystems across the world!"
> "Yeah, but solar panels will impact the ecosystem of this local desert so no."
> "You realize the local desert is also part of the global ecosystem will be impacted by climate change right? Right?..."
What specifically do you think solar panels will even hurt and why?
"Under the current policy, there are at least 80 million acres of federal lands open to oil and gas development, which is 100 times the amount of public land available for solar."
I have high hopes that we can provide enough energy by using already disturbed land
Based on what?
This is enough land to power every house in the US with solar if it was all used. It's interesting that even though crops are grown under solar panels all the time, you are worried about empty unused land and not the land already being used for oil and gas or the fact that 60% of all electricity still comes from fossil fuels in the US.
Also dessert is not particularly good for panels. A panel could reach 70-80°C in such environment, when its optimal is at 25°C. Will lose around 25% efficiency.
As in, what is the effect of beaming out all that reflected solar energy into space, from the solar panels? (Assuming here that the tech still uses photovoltaic panels). Any negatives?
Solar is not coming to a government parking lot near you unless these hurdles are addressed. In the very least, not "all" government parkinglots.
It actually annoyed me a bit because my childhood elementary school is in my neighborhood of houses. And they constructed large metal structures in the parking lot and installed the solar. It's basically massive metal commercial metalwork, in a residential neighborhood. A bit weird.
Definitely weird and not at all something we expect other people to live with.
And a substation might be required, so I guess bring it on. Solar panels in a parking lot could be done anywhere. Why install them in the parking lot in a quaint residential neighborhood? Why not just put them near city hall or any land the city owns but isn't in residential?
I get it, but I don't think it was really necessary or any more useful than solar on tons of other locations. The city is going to pay for x amount of electricity one way or another. They could have stick that solar in the bus terminal parking lot in the commercial side of town.
What it usually doesn't have is 6x6" metal columns going up 20' into the air, and then diagonal metal roofing with solar panels on it.
Go ahead and try to get a permit to install a metal carport in front of your house in a normal town. I don't think you'll get it because it looks ridiculous in residential. But somehow they okd industrial metal solar installations in my neighborhood.
agriculture production - ballpark of 4000-10000kg per acre sold at $1/kg, 2 harvests/year, i.e. $8000-$20000. Solar per acre - 300 days, 10 hours/day, 200Wt/m2, $0.04/KWh - $160/day at 50% coverage, ie. $50K/year.
In general - the plants efficiency is less than 5%, ie. at least 4x less than that of solar panels, and at the end everything is about energy (and information as both are opposite of entropy (ie. life and technology is about decreasing of entropy in the local neighborhood by shifting/exporting it out of the neighborhood into the wider environment))
https://www.blm.gov/visit/imperial-sand-dunes
https://www.blm.gov/visit/sand-mountain-recreation-area
https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/destination/oregon-dunes-natio...
https://www.michigan.org/article/trip-idea/discover-amazing-...
They definitely do affect the local climate, and at a very large scale they can hypothetically change the albedo of the desert enough to affect global weather and climate patterns.
I guess my answer is no, it would literally cause the climate to change so by definition that's not mitigating climate change. It would be a form of geoengineering, which is sort of its own category separate from mitigation, which refers to action that reduces change.
https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/news/press-releases/2019/...
It's not especially difficult either from a permit point of view or technically, this is well proven in Europe. See for instance:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-ventures/intercon...
"Europe’s electricity system currently has more than 400 interconnectors and is the world’s largest interconnected grid. Currently Europe has around 93 GW of cross-border transmission capacity with a further 23 GW in construction/advanced permitting by 2025"
https://www.schroders.com/en-us/us/institutional/insights/wh...
This is a good thing.
But so will farming it, paving it over, parking over it, mining it for coal or pumping it for oil and gas.
Most of what is today the United States was at one point or another purchased by the federal government, either willingly or forcefully, from its prior owner.
Land use per MWh https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Cost per MWh https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...
Other Pros / Cons I’m not going to link any sources for these. Things like the cost of local pollution, climate change, geo politics of where the energy/equipment comes from, etc all become quite controversial depending on one’s political leanings.
The above links are all US centric. And because of that it’s worth pointing out that the only metric that matters in the US is return on investment. With that in mind, solar, wind, and batteries are dominating all new installations in the US. For US specific information, both EIA.gov and FERC.gov are treasure troves of information.
Lastly, since you’ve mentioned land use specifically, it’s important to note that different countries have different priorities. South Korea and the US will look at land use very differently. For all practical purposes, the US has infinite land, so land use is largely irrelevant.
My comment comes from a place of pointing out a chain of events of engineering causing problems, then engineering solving those problems while creating new problems. Of course, if you just dismiss that plants and animals live there in the desert, then you don't need to think about them. But if you don't dismiss them but still need the solar power at all costs, then maybe studies could be commissioned that provide the ecosystem the best change for unintended negative change if the solar panels absolutely must be built.
And let's not act like these solar panels will have much to do, if anything, with helping to mitigate climate change.
https://electrek.co/2021/07/26/us-largest-solar-farm-is-scra...
You are welcome to comment on these assessments if you have concerns or input: https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2022371/570.
As the impact statement notes, there is already 9 gigawatts of solar deployed on BLM lands that we can study and learn from, to make sure the benefits outweigh the consequences.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
The next phases will be deciding where to actually put individual farms.
For example 700k acres in one spot would not be ideal as transmission losses to other regions would be significant, so we need more possible space to allow distributed production.
Significant but not as much as one might think.
"Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
https://library.e.abb.com/public/d4863a9b0f77b74ec1257b0c005...
Will be interesting how they will plan to tear this all down in 40 years.