[p2p-research] Environmental issues around solar energy plants

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks! very interesting perspective,

Michel

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 1:15 AM, J. Andrew Rogers
<reality.miner at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
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