Growing solar industry faces green backlash

PAICINES, Calif. — When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague's single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading and two big transmission lines to tap into. "Wow," he remembers thinking at the time. "God made this to be a solar farm."

But when Kim Williams looks out at that same land from her low-slung ranch house, she sees an area rich with wildlife that is helping support her grass-fed chicken farm, her neighbor's cattle operations and her peaceful way of life. She supports solar energy on a small scale -- the electric fence around her chicken coop is powered by solar -- but says when she learned about the solar plant she felt shock and disbelief. Now, she's suing to block it.

The push to create an alternative to carbon-based fuel has hit an unlikely snag: environmentalists.

The split between Peterson and Williams illustrates this awkward state of affairs. To a growing number of environmental advocates, the dozens of large solar plants that are springing up in vast areas of the western wilderness are more scourge than savior.

The upshot is that those who on paper seem to be perfect allies for solar are turning into its biggest enemies.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40925558/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/

Some are closer to luddites than environmentalists. They like small projects for themselves, but reject the larger projects that work to reduce our use of fossil fuels. This is partly because such projects are industrial in nature, rather than small, individual efforts. Using solar power to run an electric fence appeals to this group, but a large solar power installation gets the same negative response as a coal-fired plant, if it's being built near them.

It's a conflict that will last forever, since industrial-scale environmental projects will always get rejection from these micro-scale environmentalits.

What these people are discovering is what it really means to build renewables to full scale. When you're powering your electric fence with a couple panels, you can pretend renewables are impact-free. When you start getting serious about energizing the power grid of an industrial nation, the reality becomes harder to ignore.

When confronted with the reality of what solar power really means on a competitive scale with other power generation, a lot of people suddenly don't like it so much. Now, they don't mind if these solar generation projects are built out in the middle of the desert somewhere, but they don't want them anywhere near their little spots.

It's similar to the locavore thing, where people say that the solution to the problems with industrialized food production is to buy $20 pastured chickens instead of the $5 chicken. They don't realize, or care, that it would be impossible to feed 300+ million people with pastured chickens, even if most people could afford such a thing. They don't realize, or care, that if everyone showed up at their favorite farmer's market, it'd be sold out in ten minutes and have no more food to sell.

Some people simply do not understand the scale of things, and propose ludicrous solutions to current problems.

Huge areas of land are torn up for small amounts of very expensive electricity.

In a similar fashion even larger areas of California's central coast have been ripped up converting traditional open rangeland with its diverse wildlife to grape monoculture.

I hate our economic system that is always pushing for more development. Why can't we back off and create an economic system that uses less while improving the lives of everyone?

We know the wealth of those who can afford solar power and expensive wines does not "trickle down" to people who have nothing. They work hard, or they can't find work, and they are still left with no wealth of their own, which makes the environmental impacts of those who have everything all the more egregious.

I think projects like this proposed solar plant are detrimental to the common good and bad for the environment.

... and not waste our resources building ill-conceived, hideously expensive, and environmentally destructive solar projects.

If solar makes you feel good, put it on your own roof and pay for it yourself.

My light bill is $25 a month. It used to be $50 a month until I got a 5 watt server for my computer rather than leaving my computer on all the time. I turn it off now and save $25 a month. It's really easy to cut back, but we're a nation of consumers.

Oh, well...

fuel use, eh? Do you have any idea of how we might start using less electricity as a nation? What would your plan be?

But I'm not anti-nuclear. I'd happily replace fossil fuel power plants with nuclear power plants, and fossil fueled aircraft with electric high speed rail.

How to use less electricity? Reduce overall economic activity and compensate by cutting the work week to thirty hours, raising the minimum wage, and building a very substantial social safety net.

Make it very easy for people to contribute to society in ways that don't use a lot of natural resources. Measure the public welfare in happiness and not by our current twisted and destructive measures of "productivity."

This is one of the least populated areas of California. It's dry as a bone, and gets almost no rain, so it's essentially useless as farmland. It's a heavily mineralized area, and the sun shines there with almost no break. The few people who bother to live there are primarily iconoclasts who move out there because property is cheap and they can pretend the world isn't crowded. Most don't stay there long.

One highway goes through the area, but there are no towns there to speak of. It's a desolate, uninviting spot. I know it well, because I used to visit there to buy minerals from a guy who mines benitoite near there. It's a perfect place for a solar installation. There are few better locations, and they're all in desolate areas, too.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&safe=off&q=paicines,+ca&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Paicines,+CA&gl=us&ei=7iwnTarSLsfOnAe1te2zAQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ8gEwAA

I read the EIR, and the people who proposed siting the plant there did not do their DD when going forward with the proposal.

Saline sodic land in Westlands would have been a MUCH better choice.

everywhere, even in isolated, relatively desolate areas.

I think building out solar fields can work well in the desert with minimal impact. But I know that in reality they're going to bring in bulldozers and big concrete trucks and just lay waste to the whole terrain where the field would be placed.

The Steens Mountain people are also very remote. They are broke because of BLM cattle restrictions (used to be all grass fed beef up there). So they're willingly allowing the wind industry to tear up habitat by avoiding laws (the wind industry is building three "separate" wind farms, to allow them to skirt restrictions on roadway building, and water contamination; reality is that the wind farms themselves are all in one area and should be considered one farm; and the wind industry somehow violated the Steens Viewshed Federal Law that no one seems to recall ever being in place).

The renewable industry like any industry wants to make money. If there's a low impact way of doing something and there's no law on the books mandating that it be done that way, they won't do the low impact approach, you can bet on it.

http://www.san-benito.ca.us/departments/planning/documents/Solargen/deir/c06_biology.pdf

One shouldn't dismiss these people like you appear to be doing, they're really talking about how to do this with as minimal impact as possible. I really really like this.

That is pure BS if I ever heard it. The presence of wildlife necessitates the presence of predators and predators want nothing better than to get past those electric fences and devour her lucrative cash crop of chickens. If grasshoppers can get past the fence then so can rattle snakes and other predators. Her argument just doesn't hold water.

This person is a pure NIMBY selfish, self-centered "moran" every bit as much as the wall street bankers are. The real goal in filing the lawsuit is to maintain her property values and her personal, private view of a pristine valley. If she wanted to control what happens on all those miles of land then she should have bought it before anyone else.

Just another Capitalist that rails against "big government" until there's a profit in it for her to steal from the tax payers' till or receive an undeserved benefit at the expense of the rest of us. Boo Hoo. I cry big fat alligator tears for her losing her million dollar view that she bought on the cheap. Millions of Americans have no view at all. Millions more have only one view: bars on their windows.

:nopity:

are also suing. :P

That proves nothing. The benefits of putting solar power generation in all the "inhospitable" places we possibly can far outweigh the disruption of a few niche environments. The only other option is to continue burning coal in the same amounts as we do today --which will lead to far more widespread extinctions than making a parking lot out of the entire desert southwest.

The stakes are far higher than you seem to think. We are looking at global climate catastrophe, sea level rise, violent weather extremes that we're just seeing the beginning of (much worse to come in future decades), desertification of vast stretches of land that are now "arable." The sea level rise alone will wipe out more species than paving the desert southwest, in my opinion.

population. I've seen many say as much. They don't want actual solutions. They want humans to go away. Other humans than themselves, of course...

Our solutions create the next set of problems. Renewable energy will be no different. Even larger scale solutions to the problems created by the previous large scale solutions will be no different. Even larger technological solutions to the problems created by the previous large scale technological solutions will be no different. Smaller scale, or less technologically advanced solutions, just create a different set of problems. We're stuck in that yin and yang type loop.

I work in the environmental field in California, I've worked on the Calico site mentioned in the article, and one of my best friends was a project biologist on the Panoche site.

Habitat conservation is my number one issue. It's clearly not a concern of the person/people who wrote this article.

Let's not even have this argument. :hi:

But it is one of my main concerns and why I support wholeheartedly the buildout of solar and wind in all areas possible, HVDC transmission lines, smart grid, energy storage for all wind and solar projects, etc, and the end of using fossil fuels for anything but making stuff we can't yet make with alternate means like biofuels. I was just trying to get the big picture into the discussion: it's not about one lady's view or a single valley with a few coyotes struggling to find a meal, it's our very survival that is at stake.

then we have to ask ourselves what we're trying to save here.

I'm sure most people think that the entire southwest is a wasteland, but it's totally not. There are grasslands, forests, fascinating cactus ecosystems... a large diversity of life. If the discussion was about paving over Washington state, or Maine, people might not be so eager to see these projects built out.

Also, Panoche is NOT one lady's project, and it's one of the few areas with a healthy kit fox population, among other species. Read the EIR and the comments to the EIR:

http://www.san-benito.ca.us/departments/planning/documents/Solargen/

This project is 5000 acres - about 7 square miles. Think about 3.5 x 2 miles in size. Pretty small footprint in that area, really.

covered with CSP to power the entire US. That's 10,000 square miles to stick somewhere in the US.

According to Jacobson's numbers, in order to power the world with renewables, we'd have to use almost 2% of land surface area, or more area than ALL of our cities combined.

Even the Panoche project doesn't sound like that big of an area, but it's 1/3 of the valley floor, of which the USFWS has said that 90% needs to be conserved in order to provide habitat for the endangered animals there.

in size? Really?


Not really. I've been there many times. 15 square miles is only a space 5 miles by 3 miles. This project uses only 7 square miles. The valley is way, way larger than that. Have you ever been there?

This is what bugs me about "professional environmentalists," you are laser focused on this one area "one of the few habitats for the kit fox" and other "endangered species." On it's surface it sounds quite reasonable, until you ask yourself how many species will go extinct due to global climate change --the very thing that huge solar projects like Panoche will help to avoid. The most reliable predictions call for widespread desertification across the entire southwest due to climate change. How many species that now enjoy a woodland habitat will sooner or later become extinct due to desertification? Does anyone on DU have a number? Hundreds? Thousands? Certainly if we include the insect species the number has to be at least in the hundreds and possibly in the thousands. If we only include mammals like the kit fox then we aren't really being very good environmentalists, are we?

Refer to:
http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts
"Increased frequency and altered timing of flooding will increase risks to people, ecosystems, and infrastructure.
Rapid landscape transformation due to vegetation die-off, wildfire, and loss of wetlands along rivers reduces flood-buffering capacity. Decreased snow cover on the lower slopes of high mountains and the increased fraction of winter precipitation falling as rain and therefore running off more rapidly also increases flood risk."

http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/regional-climate-change-impacts/southwest#issue1


Desertification predicted:
"Many scientific computer models have been predicting significant increasing temperatures and increasing desertification in the American Southwest, Africa, Australia and other areas because of increasing concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) in our atmosphere."

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/dec/20/lack-will/

I linked it up thread, they focus on quite a variety of species that are unique to that area.

In any event, this is not luddite scaremongering but rather an attempt to have a reasoned plan to build something out. I mean, really, does anyone here have an issue with recommendations to prevent, say, erosion? (That would have not otherwise occurred were it not for the build out.)

Unfortunately there exist no projections out until 2035 or further that indicate we will do anything significant about global climate change. We can support solar plants, of course, but we should not sit idly by acting as if it is achieving a greater good for the globe.

I support proper siting and proper establishment of all renewable technologies, but I'm not going to stick my head in the sand (yes I know ostriches don't do this) and pretend that every single magical renewable project doesn't have land and environmental impacts.

You aren't addressing my post at all. We don't have the luxury of viewing the world myopically the way you describe. The future holds extinction for thousands of species if we do not make ending the use of fossil fuels our #1 priority.

By the way, on that list of thousands of species facing extinction from fossil fuel use: homo sapiens sapiens.

You seem to think that is a fault. It's not.

One side of your face says we need to do more to protect the environment while the other side of your face says you will fight to block solar power projects "because they may harm the environment."

You're talking out of two sides of your face. By attempting to hamper progress toward massive solar energy projects you are dooming thousands of species to extinction, continuing global climate change will be catastrophic for marine life, desert life, temperate zone forest life, plant life as we know it today, etc. Please look again at that tree: it's part of an entire forest!

Please don't misrepresent where I am coming from.

In a related thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=270258&mesg_id=270314

I am not against solar fields, in fact I believe solar CSP is our only real chance to succeed.

But I believe we should approach it with a minimal impact sort of way. Like I said before, if companies can get away with damaging the environment and there are no laws on the books or fines on the books to prevent it, they will.

Damaging the environment is more profitable than minimizing impact as much as feasible.

You can say you want solar fields as far as the eye can see but from your statements in this thread I can see that you are more of an impediment to saving the environment than anything else.

It may fill you with warm fuzzy feelings to save a tiny patch of remote desert but saving a few species there (or a few dozen) will doom thousands upon thousands of species elsewhere. It must make you feel like God, deciding who lives and who dies like you do.

It's not about "saving species there" it's about "chosing the environment over profits." I know it's a hard concept to get ones head around. You're going to alter the environment regardless, it's whether or not you want to profitably plow down some small piece of land to get government incentives, or whether or not you want actually give a shit about the environment.

I know the Club of kristopher is great, and accusing people of shit that you can't support is par for the course, but I'm getting tired of it here. I do not merit the bullshit slander I receive here.

But you have failed to acknowledge the facts of the situation twice in a row now. We don't have the option to take baby steps with solar and wind power. Had Ronnie Raygun not demolished Pres. Jimmy Carter's environmental and energy independence plans we would have decades to pick and choose just the perfect and least harmful places to put thousands of solar power plants. But, unfortunately for us, he was corporate-owned and operated so he worked tirelessly to kill or hamstring every environmental effort, now we are too late to take the slow route, in my opinion.

Please tell me which marine creatures you wish to see go extinct. Please tell me how many hundreds of miles of coastal wetlands you are OK with sacrificing (along with the species that live there). Please tell me which of the thousands of creatures great and small that you would rather see die off just so you can say you "made a difference" by blocking solar power in the desert southwest.

Please make your choice and publicly state.

And I already stated how it could be done with building a factory in the NM or AZ deserts. Such a factory would cost at most a billion bucks and it could be made to have minimal impact.

But, oh, no, even contemplating minimizing impact means we want to see the world burn. :sarcasm:

The whole reason the trough designs are so popular is because they're very easy and relatively cheap to set up. But they all require grading down the land and destroying habitat. I see no logical reason why CSP and habitat cannot co-exist.

The Sterling Engine solar power plants have a concrete base sunk into the ground and a large parabolic dish to focus the sun's rays, maybe that would be less invasive. More expensive, though.

I agree that CSP has to be a big part of our solar power picture but its power output is more degraded by cloudy weather than is solar PV so we really do need both. I'm not a fan of doing anything half way, or 2% of the way for that matter. We need solar and wind for our survival as a dominant species on this planet and we need as much of it as we can get.

We seem to disagree on the exact habitat that is to be impacted but maybe we're more in agreement than my earlier posts would seem to suggest.

Its overall impact would be trim the brush every other row, but to allow the habitat to exist. However, the project got sold and the whole thing is changed, which is the primary reason for the uproar with the Sierra Club, but this may not be the topic to discuss it.

Going from "sterling on posts with minimal brush cutting" to "grading down and fencing in troughs" is pretty significant. Troughs have to be fenced for safety reasons. You don't want animals climbing on pipes full of volatile PCBs.

I suppose you want the fencing for other reasons. I don't know, but I spent several hours looking at solar fields (and I can cite the ones I looked at) and they're all fenced. I don't see why animals cannot live under our reflectors.

:shrug:

These solar collectors just need a large fairly-flat sunny area, right? Why can't we float them out at sea miles off the coast tethered to each other, the sea-floor and transmission-cables back to landmass?

Build them, put them on top of floats, quilt them together into fairly-flat low-visibility low-density mats of collectors. Have you ever actually gone 15 miles off the coast and looked? There are no birds, no surface wildlife to impact for most of the Earth's water-surface area. Yes, a rich ecosystem exists underneath but it has minimal interaction with the surface; most of the above-surface oceanic-area of the globe is a barren and lifeless desert.

They'd be more protected there as well, there is nothing there to impact them except storms and rarely hail. We just need to keep them out of whale-breaching grounds and sea-lanes.

I think you should check it out. CA isn't letting the solar industry just walk all over the land there. I've read many a wind project impact report and they're no where near as comprehensive as this.

Are there any projections regarding changes in temperature, rainfall, etc?

:)

There's plenty of room for solar within our currently developed areas - on rooftops, parking lots, along roadways, over old landfills, etc.

Populate these spaces with solar first, then if you need more power, plow over the deserts/farmland/whatever.

The reason people plow over virgin land is because it's simpler. Doesn't make it right.

The base of our solar reflectors don't have to have perfectly flat graded land to be placed, for instance. In theory you'd be giving desert creatures a lot of shade (but the temperatures would still be up there), but you won't be necessarily destroying their habitat.

This is how they've evolved. People hear the word "desert" and think of barren landscapes with no life, but there is life everywhere in the desert if you look for it.

The light levels in the shade under our reflectors is still very high, since they need axial movement. You may kill the desert under the shade since it will no longer be parched and dry, but the desert predators will be able to use the fields as hunting grounds, since they will support more life.

I can envision minimal impact constructors that drive in the desert (BLM land that is typically used for offroading in any case), and that place reflector stands or PV stands. It might take a wee bit longer and a lot more money but it can be done.

You have to dig/pour some sort of foundation, not to mention digging trenches or erecting towers to run high voltage interconnect cables, constructing stationary buildings to house transformers & maintenance equipment, as well as high voltage towers to tie the facility to the grid.

All of this infrastructure requires very large vehicles and equipment to create and will absolutely disturb the land.

Not that I'm opposed to it, but the impact would be real, so don't minimize it.

The old fashioned way: you bring in bulldozers and concrete trucks and you flatten out the land, grade it down completely. You dig your holes, dump in your concrete, and drop in your polls. Since you've already graded the land down you have to build erosion stops between the reflectors, there's your road. The entire habitat of whatever animals are living there is destroyed, every animal that lives there is dead, period. Then, because it's private property, you put up fencing to keep people and animals out. You also use PCBs as your cooling fluid because no one wants to use that crap anymore and it's cheap, plus we're building in a desert "wasteland" so who cares. We'll chose to clean our reflectors with water shipped in from somewhere else because the trough design is not well suited to vibration cleaning or static repellent cleaning, and you need that water anyway for the cooling towers in your 30% efficient generators.

The Josh way: you bring in a specialized vehicle that drives on stilt extension wheels (imagine a large truck that is 20 feet in the air). This vehicle alone does the installation of the reflectors, it clears the ground immediately around where the base is, and it digs a hole, and pours the concrete, and places the pipe. Wiring is buried by a pipe layer that, in one movement, pulls a hole through the terrain, lays the piped wiring, and buries it. No roads are made because the tracks that the vehicle would leave behind are no more than off roaders leave behind. No erosion problems are created because the terrain is not changed. The initial impact is solar reflectors taking up some small percentage of the ground, and somewhat disturbed soil where the vehicle and the line burying extension went. We'll also use some molten salt variety as our heat exchange fluid, because PCBs are really nasty and molten salt is able to be passively secured in the event of a pipe leak. There will be no fences, because there's room for wildlife to live under the reflectors, and we don't require people to come out with hoses and wash the things down. Since we're using molten salt we can also have higher temperatures, so we'll have brayton cycle generators that are air cooled, and 20% more efficient than the other designs.

Cost for trough reflectors with one axial tilt and piping (filled with PCBs) and some plowing of shit down? No idea. Less than the generator and the PCB handling technology, most likely.

Cost for flat reflectors and stands with 290 degree axial tilt, Gorilla Glass and static dust replant technology, and a central hub with big molten salt reactor? A shit load more than the cheap industrial approach.

When you started posting and made "mistakes" like the one I'm going to discuss, I attributed it to a lack of information on your part. However with time your "mistakes" have revealed a consistent pattern of apparently malicious behavior directed at renewable energy.

You wrote:


PCB's ARE NOT USED FOR ANY TYPE OF SOLAR POWER!

What *is* used in solar thermal is diphenyl oxide and biphenyl. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/environment/88/8805bus1.html
(You've repeated made clear your disdain of their publications, so I apologize that the reference is from the American Chemical Society.) These are not toxic substances - diphenyl oxide is used in soap and perfume.

Our past use of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) was one of the most insidious, widespread ecological disasters in this nations history. That is why they were banned in 1977; since then,"the manufacture of new PCB electrical equipment (transformers and capacitors) is entirely prohibited". ( http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/pcbs/01.htm )

Bookmarked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therminol



It was a mistake, but I expect you to continue making shit up.

Therminol is used in these solar factories, I should've been more thorough.

Difference between me and you? I admit my mistakes.

I think that was pretty clear earlier.

Which is typical.

I don't see how I could've magically made up that redirect.

This is a typical example of the kind of stuff you routinely post and it is that long term behavior which *demonstrates* intent.

You usually just deny what you actually wrote so it is extremely refreshing for you to at least 'fess up on this one.

However, I read the part on PCBs wrong because it says that the US still allows it in closed systems.

I really should've given it further consideration because this has been debated before here.

How are you? :D

Or do you prefer to grade down large swaths of desert because they're mostly desolate wastelands or something?

I still do not like the trough design because every time a trough is build, actually, any time any solar field is build, there is grading. Troughs require terrain shaping unless the land is very flat (indeed, in the original post the capital investor was giddy at the prospect of not having to significantly grade the land he was working on). Look at any before and after solar project, they tear up the land.

you bring in a specialized vehicle that drives on stilt extension wheels (imagine a large truck that is 20 feet in the air).

Which major vehicle manufacturer (if any) builds this "specialized vehicle", and how much extra does it cost?

Wiring is buried by a pipe layer that, in one movement, pulls a hole through the terrain, lays the piped wiring, and buries it.

This is called a 'trench' and is still disruption of the land. Is this task also done with a "specialized vehicle?"

There will be no fences, because there's room for wildlife to live under the reflectors,

Besides a few hydroelectric dams, name one major power generating facility in this country that isn't surrounded by a fence or something similar. Power companies put fences around these facilities because they are expensive, potentially dangerous, and also potential targets.

Again - not trying to naysay centralized solar, just trying to be realistic. If you're going to put a solar power plant on virgin land, you will disrupt that land. There is no way around it.

Even if you found a way to miraculously drop the solar plant in from the sky so it didn't disturb one twig of sagebrush, the simple act of taking sunlight away from the land is a disruption.

These are not big barbed wire fences you'd see at a nuclear power plant, they're small fences that foxes could jump over but other animals like turtles cannot get under. They in fact design them to keep animals out, and desert tortoises are removed from the areas where they'd be affected. By hand.

Of course, as someone else pointed out up thread, you could have floating solar platforms in the seas, but the engineering to make it work would probably be even more costly than the idea I had (and it's not too complicated; the Sierra Club prefers the sterling engine design over the trough design because of the minimal impact that they can have; there are minimal designs you can use and the troughs are at the bottom of that, by far).

Minimal impact designs = money.

If I was free to do it, I sat down with the math, and I believe could supply 60% or better of my energy needs from the rooftop space of my building.

The only reason to start with the ground first is that its easier to charge people for a centralized energy supply.

Indeed, a report from AU recently came out that the people building out solar are those who are rich, because they benefit from the tax breaks more. Once the cost comes down we'll see how quickly solar shingles take off.

How could anyone possibly get the idea you are intent on maligning renewable energy?

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s3063136.htm

Why would I make such a fundamental and easily checked error (PCBs) if I intended to malign renewables?

The only difference is this time you admitted it.