The agency has already approved 17 large-scale solar energy projects on public lands that are expected to produce nearly 6,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 1.8 million homes. The department estimated the resource potential of the newly identified development zones at 23,700 megawatts, enough to power seven million homes, by 2030.
Wow! 23,700 megawatts! That’s a lot of megawatts! Right?
No. It’s not…
If all 285,000 acres were covered with solar PV arrays, the “Hot Spots” could have a generating capacity of about 40,000 MW at a cost of about $252 billion.If the same 285,000 acres were covered with natural gas-fired power stations, the “Hot Spots” could have a generating capacity of about 1.8 million MW (1.8 Terawatts) at a cost of about $1.5 trillion.
To put this in a little better perspective…
US electric utilities added an average of 22,734 MW of generating capacity per year from 2001-2010. If the “Hot Spots” acreage was devoted to that annual capacity growth…
Solar PV would consume all 285,000 acres in 21 months at a cost of $143 billion per year.
It would take 80 years for natural gas-fired plants to cover the 285,000 acres at a cost of $19 billion per year.
If every acre of the newly designated Federal land was developed for solar power, it would cover less than two years of the average annual incremental growth in US generating capacity.
It really is ironic that President Obama thinks that, “Even if we drilled every square inch of this country right now, we’d still have to rely disproportionately on other countries for their oil,” while his administration crows about setting aside 285,000 acres of public land for solar power development that can’t even match our average incremental generation capacity growth for two years.
I wonder if the people who oppose developing ANWR because, by itself, it might only cover a few years of our total oil consumption, are simply giddy about “Boot” Salazar’s latest boondoggle… 
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Oh, you want to talk about economics? Fine, assume that $252 billion buys you the 4320 MW of actual solar PV generation covering the entire 285,000 acres. Now otherwise we could that that $252 billion and build approximately 20 nuclear reactors at 1000 MW apiece.
That’s 20,000 MW running at 80 per cent average lifetime capacity for about 60 years compared to the paltry 4320 MW you get from building the solar arrays. That’s more than a 4:1 cost ratio in just construction costs between solar and nuclear, and we haven’t even taken into account that the solar capacity factor, with diurnal and atmospheric variations, will be somewhere in the order of 25 per cent with a supposed lifetime of 20 years.
And people have the gall to say that nuclear is expensive.
20 years in the desert southwest? I live here. It won’t happen. Those silly panels won’t make it a couple of years without constant TLC.
All of this green energy costs money to develop and we have seen that it doesn’t happen without the backing of Uncle Sam and Dear Uncle is broke, and must borrow to do anything. The US government is being offered “teaser rates” on the money it is borrowing. This same deal was offered to home buyers a few years ago. Anyone not familiar with how this worked out has some reading to do. As the US claims to be a “full faith and credit” operation the future will play out a little differently when the rates reset and become non-zero. My guess is that the phrase “higher taxes” will be involved. If anyone claims to know how this will work out – please provide the information.
They say that a digital billboard can consume up to 30 times the energy that an average American home uses.
So, to rephrase their statement, the department estimated the resource potential of the newly identified development zones at 23,700 megawatts, enough to power 233,333 digital billboards – like the ones that Al Gore and Forecast the Facts used to to spread their message during the Heartland conference.
Or, for another comparison, look where all the selected zones are – in Nevada. How long would 23,700 megawatts last on the Las Vegas strip?
According to a Forbes article (in 2007) Las Vegas uses 5,600MW on a summer day and is expected to use 8,000MW by 2015. It’s hard to determine how much the strip uses by itself, but the article says that the casinos consume 20% of the city’s entire electricity demand. Of course, not all of the casinos in Vegas are on the strip, but on the other hand the strip has more on it than just casinos.
20 percent of 5600MW equals 1120MW.
23700/1120 equals about 21 summer days. For the rest of the year, they’d be on the grid.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0312/092.html
John F. Hultquist;
If anyone claims to know how this will work out – please provide the information.
>>>>>>
Oooh! ooooh! ooooh! I know! I know!
….badly.
The grid is tapped out. All intermittent loads must be firmed with reliable CCGT’s. The only thing that is getting permitted these days. Due to conflicting environmental laws pushed mainly from leftist groups don’t allow for hydro Inc’s or Dec’s any longer. Inc is incremental load due to voltage and frequency sags from wind and solar falling off. Dec’s are decremental loads or generation shedding through spills for abrupt increases in loads.
Thus CCGT’s thus are firming all of these loads.
Compressed Air or Underground Storage, Pumped Hydro and Batteries of all things are being tried. All grotesquely expensive.
Recommendation: Vote in November for the party at all levels who will help put an end to this nonsense. The experiment was successful with negative results. We simply cannot afford these people any longer.
“Worthless Junk in three years” sounds about right. What with Clouds, low sun angles, a sun that refuses to sit still, weeds, dust. bird droppings, hail damage, vandalism and natural decay, it could drop as low as two years with a bit of luck. By that time the bag-men will be well away with the loot, there will have been an election and the incoming government will have to sort out the mess.
How many Olympic-sized swimming pools is that?
Miss Grundy, how very, very clever! “Anyone have the impression that tho he officials at the Department of the Interior have been staring deep into their own interiors to come up with crap like this?”
I laughed so hard the guy next to me on the plane thought I was losing it. THAT line is going in my list of Great Truths!
Ally E. says:
July 26, 2012 at 7:04 pm
They must really really really believe it’s going to work. I’m reminded of that planned arctic sea crossing where they figure they’ll run everything off a solar panel. They have no idea. Of course when it fails, they’ll blame the skeptics.
Someone with some common sense evidently got to them — they installed a small wind turbine before they left (still touting the *two* solar panels, though). Seems that wasn’t enough to power all the stuff, though — last word from the intrepid quartet was that their ‘lectrical stuff wasn’t getting charged, they were out of Cheez-It® crackers, and might be putting in to Prudhoe Bay for repairs.
Willis was right — they’ve been hugging the coast since they discovered there was no way through the ice.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 26, 2012 at 11:22 pm
Someone with some common sense evidently got to them — they installed a small wind turbine before they left (still touting the *two* solar panels, though). Seems that wasn’t enough to power all the stuff, though — last word from the intrepid quartet was that their ‘lectrical stuff wasn’t getting charged, they were out of Cheez-It® crackers, and might be putting in to Prudhoe Bay for repairs.
*
What, you mean they’re not gnawing on a polar bear by now? I THINK I got that the right way around… 🙂
Better idea = (a) exercise federal eminent domain over every one of the Government National Mortgage Authority’s foreclosed houses in Congressman Dingy Reid’s state; (b) put those same acres of non-Solyndra solar panels on their roofs, plus cover the lawns, shrubs, walkways & driveways with them; (c) send the electricity into the homes of all wage earners the IRS identifies living nearby; (d) charge the resident a premium for participating in a cap & trade program ; (e) lather, rinse & repeat in all 57 states.
And let’s not forget that panels reduce Earth’s albedo, promoting warming.
All that low-emissivity glass reduces Earth’s thermal IR, promoting warming.
All that fuel they burn to CO2 for these solar follies will never be displaced by their meager output, promoting warming.
The reduced efficiency of intermittant backup generates extra CO2, promoting warming.
It’s interesting that their other energy follies, wind and biofuel, are similarly disastrous, but that’s par for Big Govt, as always the greatest threat of all time to prosperity and liberty (without which there can be no prosperity — just read the new book ‘Why Nations Fail’).
Bill;
What site are you getting the Idiots’ Updates from?
I’ve got these magic beans you can use to grow a beanstalk, then climb up and steal electricity from that mean old giant on that thunderhead cloud.
And they cost *way* less than those solar panels.
They work at night, too.
These 285,000 acres eventually covered with PV to generate 40,000 MW (peak, nameplate) at a cost of $252 Billion.
Let’s see how many “Trans Alaska Pipelines” (TAPS) is the equivalent of that energy.
1 TAPS = 600,000 BO/day (Bbl. of Oil per day) or 25,000 BO/hr.
1 BO = 1.73 MWhr [1] energy equivalent.
25,000 BO/hr * 1.73 MWhr/BO = 43,250 MW
But let’s convert the oil into electricity, with reasonable conversion loss,
Let’s say 1 BO yields 1 MWHr electricity.
Therefore 25,000 BO/hr * 1 MWhr elec / BO = 25,000 MW electricity.
So the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, currently running at 1/3 of its design capacity and in danger of being shut down because the flow rate must be kept high enough to keep it from freezing solid is supplying us with 25,000 MWhr of electricity
Those 285,000 acres with 40,000 MW is therefore about 1.6 Trans Alaska Pipelines.
Oh, but that 40,000 MW is NAME PLATE, Maximum output at noon on a cloudless day.
Average output is probably about 20 % of that or 8,000 MW.
I conclude that the DOI’s $252 Billion plan will provide Electricity that is
equivalent to only one third of a Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
What is more, we don’t have to build the pipeline…it has been running for 30+ years… We just have to be smart enough not to lose it through stupid policies.
[1] Rasey: 4/1/2011 comment on Giant 7 MW Sea Fan
I hope y’awl realise that renewables are not a choice?
Your going to have to install this stuff on your homes to get power. The fossil fuel industry, at some stage is going to lose critical mass, and start, also becoming intermitent.
Western economies are in their death throws. Productivity is falling thrugh the floor. Demographics are not condusive to growth. It’s only a matter of time from here.
You better start getting independant of Government and Regulatory systems. They’re toast!
I forgot to include these two gems from Boot’s press release…
So DOI will be open to solarizing another 19 million acres… 2.66 million daylight-only megawatts at a bargain price of $16.8 trillion.
78 million acres were excluded “from solar energy development” to protect “natural and cultural resources.”
Presumably, the natural resources are being protected from development – which zeroes out their value as resources. And… What exactly are cultural resources? Are they like archaeological resources? In the Gulf of Mexico, archaeological resources consist of pretty well all seafloor debris over 60 years old. We have to avoid those debris and clean up all debris younger than 60 years old.
With our recent unseasonably warm weather across America, is anyone looking into to the wind farms impeding Nature’s air flow causing the lack of Artic air to cool the nation?
And even then – there would be large environmental impacts (desert flora and fauna adapded to sun’s rays, not shadows) and one would have to hook all those solar arrays up and transmit of the electricity to those nearby centers of population.
This ‘Renewable for Baseload’ is just a Fairy Tale.
I’m still shaking with chuckles from all the snappy comments. I’ll add that the area within ANWR that those mean, evil oil companies want to drill would fit within the perimeter fence of the Atlanta airport (~ 4 sq. mi.). (A humorless comment, but a useful perspective-setter.)
Oh, and don’t forget the transmission lines needed to connect this boondoggle together and to “the grid.”
Interested,
Right you are. My calculation was 36 x 10(4) not 3.6 x 10(4)
(Damn those orders of magnitude anyway.)
but, but you’re forgetting about the added heat island effect. there’s got to be around 78000 megawatts averaged over the day due to the decrease in albedo from something like 0.3 for sand down to 0.03 for solar panel. put another way, on average putting in a solar panel instead of a natural environment for a deep desert can change the albedo from 0.3 for sand to 0.03 for solar panel which as mentioned above can produce about 10% power from the energy coming in. Rather than the global average of 239W/m^2 being absorbed, we now have 331 W/m^2 with 90% of that becoming heat instead of 100% of 239W/m^2 so there is a net increase to 300W/m^2, an addition of 61 W/m^2 added to the environment as heat. Assuming an average T of 288.2k, that means we have to emit an additional 61 w/m^2 away from Earth out of the 239 w/m^2 already being emitted. Since only 61% makes it out from what’s being emitted from the surface, we would have to raise the surface T enough so that 61/0.61 = 100 W/m^2 of added surface emissions as compared to the 391 W/m^2 for the average T. So 491 w/m^2 would need to be emitted. That corresponds to a T avg of 305 K instead of 288.2k or an added 17 deg C increase for the area covered by solar panels using averages.
So now we know what could possibly raise Earth’s temperature by a substantial amount, far more than a co2 doubling or two. Just convert Earth’s surface into a giant solar panel. We also now know that for every 1 watt of solar panel generation, there’s going to be about 2 w/m^2 of waste heat added to the environment so solar power cannot really generate enough power to dissipate the added heat to the environment. For small amounts of solar panels, this is not a problem but as one goes to larger and larger arrays with the intent of providing most of power, then we will start to see negative environmental impacts of regional size or larger and if most all of the land mass gets converted, then there will be substantial negative impact on the whole Earth.
It’s as good as the old nasa idea of importing solar energy into the Earth from giant satellites using microwaves. Basically, all that added power coming in will turn up as heat after use so efficiencies matter as all the energy needed for inefficient efforts turns to heat before any use occurs. It doesn’t matter when there’s only a little bit of it but if it becomes substantial… Nuclear offers the most energy for the long term, it’s the most efficient so creates less waste heat and the big difference is that all that energy is going to be dumped into the environment as the fuel decays anyway, just at a slower rate in nature than in the power plant.
Ally E. says:
July 26, 2012 at 11:44 pm
What, you mean they’re not gnawing on a polar bear by now? I THINK I got that the right way around… 🙂
Heh — according to the GPS signal, they were rowing hellbent for shore about five days ago. Maybe a poley didn’t like the tunes they were “jamming to on the iPod”…
Brian H says:
July 27, 2012 at 12:53 am
Bill;
What site are you getting the Idiots’ Updates from?
Their site’s here:
http://www.arcticrow.com/
— the GPS track is here:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=07DgH9AHVOUKbCgNLioNTrS8DZNGhqULp
— baby sis of one of the lads sporadically posts a blog note — pix of the boat (showing both solar panels and the Smurf-sized wind turbine) are here:
http://www.arcticrow.com/blog/page/3/
The main “ecological impact” is blading off upteen acres, BTW. The local opposition to these projects include a lot of “greenies”. In fact it is ‘they” who do most of the heavy lifting, since they know how to all too well. The real reason for the projects is the prospect of making a quick buck using the tax breaks and loans provided by the federal and state governments. That, and the free land from the BLM, were the core ingredients for this string of boondoggles (Browndoggles!). But trench warfare has slowed most of these to the point that the shaky investment constructions of the developers are crumbling away. Thank Goodness.
I work at China Lake and the US Navy in its infinite goofiness has been paying lip service to “green” for many years. I have benefited directly from this as I can now park my Tundra gas guzzler in the shade of a multi acre parking lot solar farm! The weirdness of this are the hundreds of 4’ fluorescent lights that burn ALL NIGHT on the underside of the panels, while during the day (my working hours, usually) the lights in my lab are dimmed by computer control during peak loads. Not illogical, but weird.