[p2p-research] Environmental issues around solar energy plants

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:24 AM, Paul D. Fernhout
<pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> So, who profits from spreading FUD about solar in the desert?
>
> On environmental impact statements, it is tradeoffs. Would the coal industry
> get a permit if someone was inventing it now? Of course not. In fact, even
> just new coal plants are not getting permits.


A point worth making is that coal and natural gas plants have similar
water-cooling requirements, and evaporative cooling is required
because many of the water sources used are parts of ecosystems that
will be sensitive to temperature change.  The closed-loop geothermal
they tend to use in the southwest generally does not have this
problem.



The southwestern deserts of the US are unique from an alternative
energy perspective.  Not only do they have very good solar potential,
they also sit on top of an unusual geological feature that makes them
the metaphorical Saudi Arabia of geothermal.  The prime geothermal
potential coincides pretty closely with prime solar potential, so in
principle you could make much of that land pull double duty,
generating geothermal base load and solar peak load.

Geothermal development in that region was largely killed by fiat
during the 1990s, a bone Clinton threw to the environmental lobby that
thought a geothermal power plant despoiled the desert in some way.
These objections would apply ten-fold to solar power facilities, which
have a much larger footprint than geothermal. Consequently, new power
plant development in the region has been largely coal and natural gas
since those do not require use of Federal land.

Not much seems to have changed. While the coal and gas industries have
obviously benefited from this, it would make the environmental lobby
their "useful idiots".


> I do think it is fair to complain that the desert is beautiful, and does
> have plants and animals, and turning it over to for-profits permanently is
> questionable, especially without significant taxes or a related basic
> income. But, the fact is, other areas of the world are being destroyed by
> fossil fuel use, whether global climate change or air and water pollution.


Most people have a very Disneyland view of the southwestern deserts of
the US.  First, it is a region about the size of western Europe,
almost completely uninhabited outside of a few urban centers, and
unvisited outside of a few famous National Parks. Second, and perhaps
more importantly, many regions of those deserts are active volcanic
badlands with very little flora and fauna; the only biologically
interesting features in much of that landscape are extremophiles that
live in the myriad hydrothermal systems (though no one seems to care
about those).  The pretty, living parts of the desert are sandstone
and granite zones, no one visits or takes pictures of the basalt
fields.

Many of the useful geothermal fields are located in the middle of
undifferentiated and ugly lava flows. These are not majestic
landscapes like you see in parts of Arizona and Utah but large basalt
valleys where there has not been enough moisture in thousands of years
to turn basalt into soil.

Opponents of solar and geothermal development use pictures from
National Parks as the reason to stop development, a disingenuous
tactic. If people saw what many of the areas under consideration
actually look like, it would be hard to drum up resistance to
developing those energy resources and the inventory of land like this
is vast such that it is very hard to pretend that a particular area is
precious or unique in any meaningful sense.

How much other land will be destroyed as a consequence of "saving"
basalt scrub flats?


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com