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The US government opens 22 million acres of federal lands to solar::The Biden administration has updated the roadmap for solar development to 22 million acres of federal lands in the US West.
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I am so sick of seeing our deserts destroyed, as though it’s somehow “empty” land. There are a million square miles of parking lots and building roofs in this country that we could cover with these things, and yet we would rather destroy ecosystems that are already delicate and millions of years old, with species that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. And then call it “green” while we do it. All of this because the government can’t be bothered to deal with (read: compensate) private property owners to cover their parking lots and roofs with solar.
They can say they’ll stay away from “sensitive resources” all they want, but that’s proven to be false in the past, so why should we believe them now? They’re only putting them within ten miles of existing transmission lines - next time, it will be within ten miles of the ones they’re building now, and so on until there’s nothing left. The sad part is that this comment will be immediately taken as being against solar and renewables, when it’s actually against destroying more of our untouched land and history for profit.
There’s already tons of solar fields and wind fields in the desert. Now they’re starting to open up old gold mines and create new ones, in the Sierras as well as the desert. Look at Grass Valley and Nevada City, where not a single resident wants some giant mining company threatening their town and their rivers, but apparently they don’t get a say about their own homes. Joshua trees have been destroyed by fires caused by climate change, and none of us will see them grow back in our lifetimes. They’ve destroyed important historical sites like the petroglyphs at China Lake and display fake ones for tourists. They’ve built Las Vegas nearly up to the edge of Red Rocks and there’s ugly mansions popping up on the way to Mt Charleston. They’re building a train straight through some of the last open desert in California east of San Diego and through the agricultural region of San Joaquin valley. They’re “cleaning up” the Salton Sea, but of course you can’t just trust that they’re not going to fill the area with McMansions after that so they can expand the tourist dollars of Palm Springs. They’re turning the western terminus of the original transcontinental railroad into a fucking strip mall called The Railyards and putting a farmer’s market in the old Southern Pacific buildings. Some Silicon Valley douchebags are building a “utopia” in the middle of the wetlands east of SF, destroying the ecosystems and birds’ migratory pattens that the region has tried so hard to protect.
In the next fifty years, there will not be any open land left in the US unless it is a lucrative tourist attraction like Yosemite. There is already hardly anywhere on the SoCal coast that doesn’t cost $20 to get near it, and half of it is private property when private beaches are supposedly illegal in California. Ironically, the last piece of wild coastline in OC is owned by the military. It’s just a blatant “fuck you” to our country’s wilderness, ecosystems, and history, and especially, it seems, to the American Southwest.
I am pretty sure much, probably most, of the US’s deserts will remain desert. But otherwise I agree: deserts are beautiful and not just empty. But hey, the US is addicted to energy and as long as that’s the case this is probably the least damaging way to generate that energy.
Yeah, but what happens when all the photons leak out into the water supply?
What’s that? That’s not how light works? Oh, neat!
Great news.
For anyone interested, here is some context to get you started on how green solar energy actually is:
https://www.treehugger.com/is-solar-energy-renewable-5179476
Does anyone have articles about the differences between centralized solar like this and decentralized solar? I’m all for renewables but this is a lot of desert ecosystems that will be destroyed for this project.
Love getting down voted for being against the destruction of fragile ecosystems
Good point. I’d like to hear more on this. Seems to me like the strongest electrical infrastructure would be a federated system as opposed to fully centralized. We also wouldn’t lose acres of otherwise untouched land that way.
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Oh look it’s the guy who believes that you can only be autistic if you’re 100% dependent on your parents. Why am I not surprised that you advocate for the destruction of ecosystems instead of decentralized generation.
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The comment you made to someone who’s diagnosed with autism where you try to invalidate because the symptoms are not as bad as someone with more support needs.
It’s very difficult to actually get “diagnosed” with autism. You and I may have some of the similarities of some of the traits but it’s not even close to what a kid with diagnosed autism actually has. Most don’t talk, don’t understand any social cues and they destroy everything in the house. Good luck going on in public because at any minute they can start screaming and won’t stop no matter what. They also will start running wherever they please and you can’t tell them not to because they don’t get it. If it makes you feel better being self diagnosed on the fringe of the spectrum to make you feel better, more power to ya. Bring on the downvotes - you all simply have no idea.
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And you’re saying it is easy? What even is your point? Do you enjoy going into places where people with a disability like to share their experiences and invalidate them because your life is pathetic?
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So I guess we’re not going to do the smart thing, going nuclear, and instead landscape more of the country.
The ideal of nuclear has a lot going for it but the reality is much more expensive than any other power generation. We need to let it go: revisit if research points to an order of magnitude cost reduction or if fusion becomes practical
Can we define “expense”? I consider the loss of public lands extremely expensive. As well as the care and feeding of the carbon based plants required to operate so the base load is maintained. I don’t know numbers, but wouldn’t such an expanse of new solar install demand huge maintenace costs - in areas increasingly prone to natural disaster?
Doubt it. Solar has no moving parts, nothing has to feed it. It just works. Given the massive repetition, when something breaks, it should usually have very little impact, very little administrative overhead, no risk of making the land unusable, and the repair person should be much less expensive than someone working nuclear
The article doesn’t say much about the land except “away from sensitive areas” and a fraction of that used by oil and gas.
Nuclear would be best I agree, but it takes 20+year to build a station and by the time it’s online, it’s already obsolete. Plus the whole nuclear waste issue. I’ve been hearing about thorium rectors for the past 25yrs and they’re still not building them. The biggest concern with renewables right now is grid integration.
Sorry, but I’m curious about a few statements here. In what way is a reactor obsolete? And how does whatever degree of obsolescence compare with solar grids that are still undergoing massive innovation- isn’t anything we build today obsolete tomorrow? Do SMRs really take 20+ years to build?
Nuclear waste “issue” must be compared to electronic waste “issue” - with total cost of ownership calcs of rare earth mining and discarding batteries on a regular basis.
And yes, of that doesn’t address the main concern which is grid integration and base load sustainment.
There’s a station in Orange County they just shut down after it sat there unused for however many years. They already bury nuclear waste in the Arizona desert, they can’t act like that’s somehow off limits when they’re willing to destroy the rest of the desert with solar panels, wind farms, and lithium mines. It’s bullshit that the American desert is viewed as being empty and without value, unless it’s pretty enough to charge tourists and entry fee. There’s zero excuse for destroying what little we have left of our open land in the US. It will be completely gone before we even have time to realize it.
Why are these solar panels not going on top of buildings? On parking lots and parking garages? We never seem to have a problem finding more room for those? I know the answer is that it will cost more and they would need some kind of rights from the property owners. That’s still not an excuse to destroy the land, the ecosystems, and the species that live there. It’s fucking disgusting, soulless, and short sighted. Teddy Roosevelt is rolling in his grave.
But nuclear doesn’t waste as much money, so of course they won’t
Your comment is 100% at odds with reality. Where do you come up with this stuff?
It’s not a simple issue. It is very complicated. Permitting, real estate, time to build, construction offsets, battery needs (solar’s weakest point likely).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
I’m more of a let’s do both, and we’ll everything we can, kinda guy.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Different methods of electricity generation can incur a variety of different costs, which can be divided into three general categories: 1) wholesale costs, or all costs paid by utilities associated with acquiring and distributing electricity to consumers, 2) retail costs paid by consumers, and 3) external costs, or externalities, imposed on society. Wholesale costs include initial capital, operations & maintenance (O&M), transmission, and costs of decommissioning. Depending on the local regulatory environment, some or all wholesale costs may be passed through to consumers. These are costs per unit of energy, typically represented as dollars/megawatt hour (wholesale). The calculations also assist governments in making decisions regarding energy policy.
I disagree, it is a simple issue: Do you want to pay way more than you need to for electricity?
“These stark differences are echoed in the most recent Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis by Lazard, a leading financial advisory and asset management firm. Their findings suggest that the cost per kilowatt (KW) for utility-scale solar is less than $1,000, while the comparable cost per KW for nuclear power is between $6,500 and $12,250. At present estimates, the Vogtle nuclear plant will cost about $10,300 per KW, near the top of Lazard’s range. This means nuclear power is nearly 10 times more expensive to build than utility-scale solar on a cost per KW basis.”
https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/nuclear-energy/solar-vs-nuclear/
"“Nuclear power is irrelevant in today’s electricity capacity market,” the report’s main author, French nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider, told pv magazine, noting that power generation from nuclear power dropped by 4%, while non-hydro renewables increased by 13%.
According to the report, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of solar PV dropped by approximately 90% over the past few years, while the LCOE of nuclear energy climbed by around 33%."
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/09/28/renewables-vs-nuclear-256-0/
Your first link is from a solar company. Mycle Schneider is a “self-taught anti-nuclear activist”. Cherry picking does make things simple.
But regardless, it’s worth considering the self-fulfilling prophecy. Starting with the state of public discourse leading to tax-incentives heavily favoring solar and wind. And how these articles’ statements exclude all manner of externalities.
If you had bothered to do more than skim the article you’d know that it links to the underlying data.
