[see update at the end]
Meet the new federal Western Solar Plan. Much of the land in the Western US is federal and managed by the appropriately named Bureau of Land Management or BLM. In some Western States, over 50% of the land is federal.
Using that land control, BLM has just proposed a monstrous (in size and scope) plan for solar power development called the Western Solar Plan. The Plan covers the eleven westernmost states, from border to border. From Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico to Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, and Wyoming.
They also have a draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the Plan, which they are taking comments on through April 28, 2024.
The PEIS and other Plan information is available here: https://blmsolar.anl.gov/
Comments should be sent to solar@blm.gov
The really important number is simple and round. It is also breathtaking. They want 100,000 MW of solar capacity developed, more than doubling US capacity. A better choice would be zero, which is also round, but I digress. This incredible number is not based on a needs analysis, as there is no need. It is just a number somebody pulled out of somewhere.
There are lots of environmental concerns with this huge number. Given that a solar facility can take 15 acres per MW, we are talking about something like 1.5 million acres of industrial plant. Plus thousands of miles of access roads, no doubt. These are mostly remote areas, and you do not deliver a thousand acres of solar panels on pickup trucks, so a lot of heavy-duty roads will be built.
These concerns are, of course, shrugged off by the PEIS in the usual industrial green way. There are lots of vague promises that care will be taken when the actual facilities come to be planned, approved, and built, which they will be no matter the environmental destruction.
But the biggest concern by far is not addressed, namely, what this monstrosity is going to cost the poor people who have to pay for it. These are the people and outfits that use electricity, many of which are already struggling to pay ever-increasing prices. What will the bill be?
One might think that perhaps cost is just not part of environmental impact assessment. Not at all, as there is an entire section of the PEIS titled “Socioeconomics”. It includes a lot of money, stuff like tax revenue, local construction revenue, jobs, etc. There are even dollar estimates for some revenue items. So, people paying for all this stuff is certainly a central socioeconomic consideration.
By coincidence, the standard estimate for conventional utility-scale solar is also nice and round at $1,000,000 a MW. So the Plan costs one hundred billion dollars ($100,000,000,00) to build, plus all those access roads.
But that is just the construction cost. Projects like utility-solar are financed over the long term, so there are big interest charges. These, plus the profits for the facility owners often can double the cost. This two hundred billion dollars is what is called the revenue requirement for the Plan, which is what the poor electricity users must ultimately pay.
Two hundred billion dollars for something they do not need. Pure Bidenomics!
In reality, the cost is higher, maybe much higher. This is because the intermittency of solar greatly reduces the efficiency of the reliable generators in the system, in effect raising the cost of their output.
The reason is simple — steam. Most of our electricity comes from what are called thermal generators. These are coal and gas-fired plus nuclear. They use heat to produce steam in giant boilers, which steam then runs a turbine generator.
The problem is that this is extremely high-temperature steam, so you cannot just stop making it when the solar generation is producing energy, which is just 8 hours a day at most. You have to keep the boilers going even when solar has replaced the output.
Thus, you are consuming fuel with no output. This adds to the cost of the output the thermal plants do produce. In this way, solar and wind both increase the cost of thermal power, making wind and solar look cheaper than they really are.
Let us call this cost of keeping the thermal generator steam hot while the sun shines the backup cost of the Solar Plan. It, too, should be estimated as part of the socioeconomic impact.
In short, the PEIS is omitting a lot of socioeconomic consumer costs. Missing costs include facility and access road construction, operation, maintenance, and repair. Also, there is decommissioning and a great deal of hazardous waste disposal. Plus financing and profit. And then the backup cost. Three hundred billion might cover it, but BLM should provide the estimates.
I urge people to comment on this incredible hidden cost aspect of the Western Solar Plan PEIS. If you do comment, feel free to post that comment here as well so we can all see and learn from it.
[UPDATE BY WILLIS, I trust the powers that be won’t mind]
Hmmm … let’s start with the fact that in Utah, which is in the area they are talking about, electricity costs the consumer about $0.11/kWh.
Next, say $300 billion, for a 100 GW nominal capacity solar plant. Solar capacity factor is about 15% because of night-time and clouds, so that’s 15 GW of actual capacity.
That calcs out to 131 billion kWh/yr.
That’s just CAPEX, capital expenditures. Then there are annual O&M, operation and management costs. These are currently running at ~ $7.90/year per kW of installed capacity. That’s $790 million per year.
Suppose we want a 10-year payback period, not unusual for business investments. We’d have to get a return of $30 billion per year on top of the $790 million O&M costs.
So. $30.79 billion / 131 billion kWh =
…
…
$0.235 per kWh.
Oh, yeah, then there’s the “wheeling cost”, the cost of transmitting the power to where it’s needed. This is on the order of $0.04 per kWh … so we’re up to about $0.28 per kilowatt-hour.
In other words, insanely expensive even ignoring the fact that government projects invariably take longer and cost more … see California’s “Train To Nowhere” or Boston’s “Big Dig” as the poster children for cost overruns
Best to all,
w.
PS—It would require 1.5 million acres of plant to be installed. Suppose it takes 10 years. 200 working days in a year, so that’s 2,000 days. So we’d have to clear, install roads, pour the concrete footings, put in the frames to hold the panels, put in solar panels, install the ancillary electrical switches etc., and wire them to the grid at the rate of 750 acres per day. That’s about 1.2 square miles (3 sq. km.) totally and completely converted from raw scrub brush land to functioning solar power plant EVERY SINGLE DAY!
Madness …
Solar of this size is going to need some serious handling. Intraday intermittency when a cloud front goes over would cause huge drops and rapid increases in output. Smoothing via batteries will become essential, especially for large contiguous areas of solar park. Plus it is hard to see what they would do with a midday surplus other than store it. Larger solar farms are looking at 30-50% of nameplate as 4 hour battery storage needed. 50GW/200GWh at $500m/GWh installed may rescue the EV battery business, but it’s another $100bn on the costs, repeated every 10 years.
Daily storage turnover would entail daily round trip losses of ~40-50GWh knocking back effective output by 2 percentage points from 15% to 13% of nominal capacity, or output of about 1.14TWh/a/GW nominal solar PV.
I suspect your grid transmission cost is underestimated. A quick search produced a figure of 4¢/kWh for 1,000 mile HVDC for capital cost – but assuming 100% line utilisation. Clearly it’s very easy to get to well over 1,000 miles of grid needed, and much of it will probably be AC rather than DC over shorter distances – but it will spread out in all directions. However, even using storage to reduce the peak flow requirement to say 50GW over an average of 500 miles gives an investment of 25,000GW.miles at $1.5m each or another $37.5bn. The average utilisation of these lines will be poor because of the hours of darkness after the battery runs out feeding the evening peak, and because seasonal variation will reduce winter throughput.
Then there’s all the backup generation for when the sun doesn’t shine. It’s looking rather costly.
Perhaps we need another qualifier. The average annual snowfall in Utah is 258 inches! Is the 1,500,000 acre plant to be built where the snow falls? If so, another oops.
Snowfall varies widely across the state, with portions of the south receiving less than 10 inches per year and areas in the mountains receiving more than 400 inches per year.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/solar/solar-value-cliff-diminishing-value-solar-power/
…solar photovoltaic (PV) energy contributes no additional capacity to the grid at a penetration level of 6 percent or beyond. Indeed, additional solar above the threshold is actively harmful to the ability of operators to maintain the capacity of the grid because it undermines the economics of those energy sources that must continue to provide the capacity to meet peak demand.
When solar PV exceeds a 6-percent market share, the capacity value of additional solar PV falls to zero.
Here’s that value destruction in practice in South Australia.
Take names. We all know it’s a fraud. They all know it’s a fraud,
The whole project is just to divert taxes and pour that money into the pockets of the already rich. The day will come for a massive RICO case.
The list of BLM managers will make a convenient list for a Grand Jury looking into criminal malfeasance.
Add in the cost for security to keep the panels from being stolen and/or vandalized. Plus replacement costs after just one or two good hailstorms. Got insurance for that? Last time I looked premiums ain’t free. What a boondoggle in the making.
Something people don’t think about back east because they consider land out here waste land. The truth is it’s a complete eco system that’s very fragile. In places you can still find wagon ruts from 100 years ago. Marks made on the land remain for a long time so people are warned when they enter government land to remain on the marked trails to limit the damage.
Cactus have extensive root system extending as much as 100 feet from the cactus and if damage will recover slowly.Cactus can be well over 100 years old so replacement takes a long time.
Animal life consist of turtles, several members of the cat family, coyotes, wolfs, javelina, snakes and other reptiles. You may go a long time without spotting any of it if you don’t know how to look for it but it’s out there and damage to the population takes a long time to recover.
What they are proposing could result in extinction or at least damage to a rather fragile population of wild live. Besides being a waste of money, it could be one of the biggest ecological blunders the government has attempted. And they call it green?
The only green the government does is destroying your money supply.
Although not on this scale, there’s a plan to build a 200 acre solar farm up the road from where I live in Leicestershire, in the English Midlands. The local community are against this development with some justification. The problem is that we are further north than any of the 48 contiguous states, which means that during winter there are around 8 hours of potential useful sunlight per day, against this potential maximum is we tend to have significantly cloudy skies, as witnessed by recent storms and flooding locally. The other issue that affects the potential useful sunlight hours is the angle of the sun in relation to the angle of the panels and their orientation with respect to the compass, which would reduce the potential useful sun hours significantly to perhaps 4 hours around noon. Of course domestic energy demand increases during the winter, we don’t tend to have air conditioning. During the summer, although daylight hours are up 16 hours, around noon the panels may get too hot and their efficiency decreases as a result.
I believe there are plans for similar systems in other parts of the county and other counties in the U.K.
With all of the work and materials involved in creating these facilities, how can anyone say they are nett zero?
On average this entire project will have to be replaced in 15 to 20 years we should go back to hydro electric, Gas fire, or coal. The so called climate change is a ruse to scare people into being controlled do not fall for it.
Where is the water coming from to clean the panels ?
Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
…
… Oh, raindrops
So many raindrops
It feels like raindrops
Falling from my eye-eyes
…
Long as I remember, the rain been coming down
Clouds of mystery pouring, confusion on the ground
Good men through the ages, trying to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder
Who’ll stop the rain
[John Fogerty – CCR]
INSANITY
why would you make a national energy policy with a massively expensive – non renewable – technology that has at best a 30 year shelf life – what then?
There’s a reason Solar is Amortized over ten years.
Any longer and you’ll still be paying for it even though you’ve started paying for it’s replacement
Crescent Dunes over and over and over again. I was exploring using google earth and came across this circle of mirrors in the desert. There’s a few pictures of the solar project that cost $1 billion dollars and didn’t produce any energy. The comments on the pictures will elucidate the fever dream the lefties exist in. Reality never penetrates.
Crescent Dunes at Tonopeh, NV failed solar project.
Has a 4.1 out of 5 star rating. It would be funny if it wasn’t so indicative of the ignorance of the left.
In the huge are of this solar installation, hail storms will be constantly destroying large parts of it. Sand is also a hazard and poor maintenance already a problem in existing solar farms. Solar panels have a huge Achilles Heel.
Has anyone been prosecuted for the murder of LaVoy Finucum?
Honestly, calling solar and wind “generators” is a misnomer. They should be put in their own class as “collectors”.
[my email to these clowns:]
As an engineer I find this plan to be a huge waste of valuable land and massive amounts of money, especially when there are more economical and better engineered ways to generate so-called “green” electricity.
Your cost estimates are pure fiction. If you research the actual cost of government projects of this scale you will find that if you are lucky the actual cost will ONLY be ten times your estimate. As for time to complete, you can easily multiply your estimate by a factor of 3, with an outer, and more likely, reality check of 10X.
If you want to build “green” power then build a dozen thorium based nuclear power sites strategically located to high demand areas and existing power lines. Perhaps add in some Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) near outlying, rural populations, thus reducing transmission costs.
Finally, cancel Jimmy Carter’s EO about fast neutron reactors and build two or three of them with reprocessing plants to process the mass of “spent” traditional fuel rods for those reactors to burn and reburn until the mass is reduced to less than a hundredth of it original size where it can be vitrified and stored with a half life less than 100,000th of the original rods, having “burned” up most all of the highly radioactive components.
If they’ve done an Environmental Impact Study, it might be amusing (but sad) to see how they justify such a disruption of Nature.
BLM should be rehabilitating land not nuking it to install solar. How much carbon could be put in the ground of 1.5M Acres of permacultured land. How many animal habits would be enhanced instead of destroyed. This green movement is truly going to destroy the plant.
What is a Solar MegaWatt? It is a Mega Watt that does not generate any power for 18 hours a day, or less if it is cloudy, and must be backed up with reliable Fossil Fuels. Wow, how long will this really go on? Lincoln said it best, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” When the lights go out, what happened in Texas will happen again. Goodness….
And if you do not know, the citizens immediately passed laws to insure sufficient spinning reserve so no more of that Horse Manure….
My liberal sister lived through this, cheerfully voted those clowns out….
There is no grid-scale battery backup, imagine many square miles for each big city, where will they put it? It will cost trillions. This is not going to happen.
“It is just a number somebody pulled out of somewhere.”
I think I can guess where they pulled it out of.
“one hundred billion dollars ($100,000,000,00)”
I think you are missing a zero! Not that an extra order of magnitude or two are going to make any difference to this brain-dead plan.