There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem.
>then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time
How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? I have yet to see a solar panel that works at night, or works well in cloud weather, or when covered by a layer of snow.
>Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km.
You missed some detail of land-use requirements in calculations. Like accounting for the battery technology that doesn't exist in order to bridge the intermittency of solar and wind. Also, even if this mythical battery technology existed, you would need to over-build wind and solar because after all, when the sun is shining you need to collect enough energy for right now + enough energy to save for later. Given that estimates say that we would need a minimum of few day (but more likely few weeks) of stored energy, for each day of power you generate, you need to over-generate a few days (or weeks) extra to store for later. Also, the population is growing. Our per-captia energy use is growing.
But let's set that aside. That is a lot of land. How can you say it's not!!!?? Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever. And that's just one country. Our ecosystem is already stressed!
If you are honestly worried about this, compare the amount of material that goes into a solar panel to the quantity of fuel needed to generate an equivalent amount of energy in that panels lifetime. Yet the damage we complain about with fossil fuels is not the mining damage, it's the change to the atmosphere. If this amount of material is really so stressful to you, compare the amount of material we use to just build the housing necessary for the world, to the amount of material needed to provide their energy needs. A typical single family roof has more than enough square footage to fully provide for all the energy needs of a household, now think of the orders of magnitude more material that are below that roof than the solar panels consist of.
However far more of the panels are recyclable, and valuable enough to be recycled. There's aluminum, glass, etc.
Solar also really works very well dual purposed with other land uses. Whether that's farming, or over parking lots, or on roofs. For dual purposing solar and farming on the same land, each use loses less than 50% productivity.
Land use and pane waste are complete red herrings that don't pass a sniff test. They persist because there are powerful forces that keep on repeating these concerns, but to be truly concerned about them, one should be far far far more concerned about every single aspect of modern life. Since I never hear the people bemoaning solar pane waste also advocate for banning single family homes and more than 30 m^2 of living space per person, I'm not sure these complaints can be taken as good faith.
No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.
And on top of that were are you getting the additional batteries to provide extra capacities for when the sun is shining at less than 100% of optimal?
And then where are you getting all the materials for those batteries? And what are you doing with all the waste from those batteries once they end their serviceable lifespan?
If you seriously are concerned about the latent costs with nuclear power plants then you should do more than gloss over the storage issues with solar.
And many of your concerns about nuclear fall apart if you don't assume we would continue to build reactors with the issues you point out. There are new designs like micro molten salt reactors that address in pretty signifiant ways the concerns you note. A lot fewer construction materials, greatly simplified designs and designs that don't rely on active cooling to prevent a meltdown. Designs that if the reactor systems are interrupted, the reactors coast to a shutdown naturally.
It's not science fiction - its proven technology we've had since the 50's that was refined in the 70's but squashed because of politics and fear mongering.
Maybe after China starts eating our lunch we'll take it seriously? Ha - probably not even then, unfortunately.
Hi from Australia.
We have huge unpopulated deserts and humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems outside climate change.
We are about to take a tiny, tiny part, put some solar panels on it and send the electricity to power Singapore.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/21/australi...
> Every single one of those panels will be land-filled and replaced continually ... forever. So you have 100km x 300km (+ whatever materials you need to support and maintain those panels) of shit going to landfills that then you will need to subsequently dig up again to replace ... forever.
Solar panels are already over 90% recyclable, with some processes recycling up to 99%: https://www.newenergysolar.com.au/renewable-insights/renewab...
Unpopulated by humans you mean.
>humans aren't really causing any stress on their ecosystems
If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too. Maybe you feel that is a fair trade and we will need to make these kinds of trade-offs ... but what if there was an alternative that used 100 times less land area for the same amount of power generated and works at night too? Would you still make the trade?
Also, there is this weird assumption made by proponents that only deserts or 'undesirable' land is going to be used for renewable deployment. That's not true today, and it will not be true in the future as we scale up the renewable infrastructure.
Sure. This was in response to this: Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity.
> If you place tens of millions of solar panels in a region you will destroy the ecosystem of that region, and yes, deserts are ecosystems too.
This is untrue. This solar farm will take up 120 sq km (out of the 10,000 sq km cattle property), and is unlikely to cause any environmental issues from the panels themselves, since they'll just shade some areas of sand.
> There is no such thing as 'empty land'.
Can't help but be reminded of this classic skit.
"The ship was towed outside the environment."
"...Into another environment."
"No no, it's been towed beyond the environment."
After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; the infrastructure and energy required for our transportation networks; etc.
Cutting down on space for solar panels is way way way down the list.
Agriculture is a problem. If you add renewables, you now have TWO problems. And funny you should mention agriculture because one of the proposed solutions to get around renewable intermittency problem is to burn bio-fuels or bio-mass. This means we would be using land not just for agriculture for human consumption, but also to grow corn or trees or whatever to burn to support the renewable infrastructure. Here's a pellet advocacy group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOzj-d83kFM) touting how green Denmark is because it burns wooden pellets! This is the technology of future: growing trees to burn. I'm not against this by the way, and it's a nice way to reuse discarded saw dust, but we also live in a world with little renewable deployment. When we scale up renewable infrastructure there will be dedicated land to just growing bio-mass to support renewables.
Anyway, the general problem is that renewables compound every other problem we need to solve around ecosystem collapse.
Somehow nuclear waste is a huge problem, but waste from silicon production and decomissioning of solar panels isn't waste.
Roof-solar is probably okay, but replacing baseload with batteries is so far-fetched, I'll believe it when i see it.
Windmills impact microclimate as well, kill off birds by millions - everyone ignores that.
Why is it ok for windmills to destroy climate and life? Since when that became the preferred way to destroy ecosystems?
This is not to say we shouldn’t strive for sustainability (we should), it is to say that discounting renewables on grounds of non-sustainability is illogical, or done in bad faith.
Domestic cats kill billions of birds every year.
I'm sure many birds are killed by wind turbines (estimates I can find in a quick search indicate 100–300k per year), and by all means we should try to site wind farms away from migration routes and take whatever steps we can to make the turbines themselves safer for birds, and possibly even retrofit or decommission wind farms in sites which turn out to be especially deadly.
However, it is not reasonable to look at this problem in isolation. If wind farms can drive coal power out of business faster, on net that is saving a huge number of birds and other wildlife.
Ultimately global climate change is going to lead to mass extinction if our current trajectory is not altered very quickly. Wind power is one way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately, you don't need the energy where people do not live, and transporting energy has a efficiency cost as well. In other words, it's massively more efficient to produce energy where you use it.
Yes, I grew up near a lot of that land. Unfortunately that land is also far, far away from most of the population in the US and thus where energy is needed.
You do realize transmission loss is a thing, right? And then what do you do when the sun isn't shining? We still consume power at night.
If this was such a trivial problem we wouldn't still be talking about it, no?
No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy.
We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plotted on a map of, say, the United States it would be a barely visible dot in a massive sea of land-that-isn't-devoted-to-solar-power. The Earth is very big, and when you get outside the areas where people congregate there's a lot of wide open spaces.
This says that US electricity consumption was 3.9 trillion killowatt-hours in 2019:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...
39 quadrillion watt hours divided by (36524) gives us average power consumption in watts.
Let's say a pretty good solar panel gets 100 watts per square meter, then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time. If we divide average power consumption by 30 watts per meter and divide by 1,000,000 to convert to square kilometers, we get:
Prelude> (((3.9 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (36524)) / 30) / (1000 1000) 14840.182648401827
So, about 15,000 square kilometers of solar panels would satisfy current US electrical needs. Let's double that to be conservative, that's 30,000 square kilometers. Sounds like a lot, right? That's a rectangle 100 km by 300 km. It's slightly more than 10% of the land area of Nevada. Definitely big, but attainable. Compared to the land we use for farming, it's barely anything (and it can be done in places that we don't farm). And in practice it would be spread out, not just in one place. And it also assumes we get 100% of our power from solar, which we wouldn't.