Do you really think we’re going to build a lot of thermal solar?

My point, we are not likely to build “a million acres” of solar and wind facilities. It would take 2,000 “Ivanpah 1″s to cover a million acres.

The mirrors have to be spaced out or they’ll block each others’ light too much. That means most of the sunlight falls between the mirrors, but acreage of mirrors is expensive while acreage of desert land is cheap.
You can see that the mirrors only cover a fraction of the ground in the last picture here:
http://ivanpahsolar.com/first-heliostat-placed-on-a-pylon

The number of mirrors on the project website is substantially less than NREL’s: 174k vs 214k. Maybe NREL hasn’t accounted for the reduction of the project due to the tortoise problem.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/37560610/SOCIOECONOMICS—FIGURE-1-Ivanpah-Solar-Power-Project—Census-2000

Shouldn’t we be talking about the area actually used for power generation and not area that a company might own?

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=62
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/projects/ivanpah

3,500 acres is 5.47 square miles, a square 2.3 miles on each side. That’s an absurd amount of land for the tower and mirror array for a thermal solar plant. Looking at the land use at Ivanhoe I’d guestimate the land used for hardware to be under 100 acres. Add in some more for roads and office space. Solar 1, a trough thermal installation used about 120 acres.

There is a lot of misinformation on the web and in the press over the size of thermal solar plants. Someone took the total size of the land BrightSource locked up and that has been used incorrectly as the project footprint.

Look at the illustration on this page. Clearly it’s not 2.3 miles from one side of the array to the other.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20087731-54/brightsource-adds-salt-for-solar-power-at-night/

Some large PV farms will be built in the desert, away from coastal fog. PV farms use about 5 acres per MW. A 100MW solar array would take less than one square mile. We’re not going to be using hundreds of thousands of acres for desert PV.

The lands identified in this article are simple places where solar or wind installations would be acceptable as opposed to national parks, environmentally important areas, etc. There’s absolutely no thought that all these lands would be used. The land has just been ‘zoned’ for appropriate use.

Actually there is about no scientific evidence concerning health problems caused by wind turbines. We do have some decent data about how far turbines need to be placed from houses, but aside from that not much else. The guy that claimed a wind turbine killed his goats, that didn’t work out for him.

Your paragraph about cutting down an acre of trees for each acre of desert used makes no sense. Don’t know why you went there.

Here’s the bottom line. Fossil fuels are destroying our planet. If we don’t stop burning them soon we will make most of the planet uninhabitable for humans.

Now, how do we replace fossil fuels? Obviously with renewables. And we’re going to have to install those renewable systems some place.

The task is to find the wind parts of the world and the sunny parts of the world which can be used while causing the least amount of damage to the areas we value for other reasons. The Interior Department has done renewables, and those who care for the environment, a great service by identifying the most and least appropriate places to install wind and solar. That means we can get the job done quicker because we won’t have to litigate every single project due to environmental concerns.

I expect future subdivisions to be designed for optimal rooftop solar. Houses with N/S footprints may well have partial roofs angled toward the south rather than a simple E/W gable pitch.

but there’s others too. Google Solar Reserve, which is going to be in California.

As some one who formerly was in the rooftop solar business, one issue with getting enough solar on rooftops is it seems that the better somebody’s roof is to make solar (typical electricity bill in California needs about 200 sq ft facing the sun with no trees or buildings shading it) the more adamantly opposed to solar the inhabitant underneath that perfect roof is. (Conversely, every treehugger in the forest wants solar!)

Because of this psychological marketing obstacle, I do not believe there is any way we can power this nation off our roofs, (short of taking over that solar “farmland” by eminent domain!) although technically, yes it is very doable. It is just more efficient to get some utility-scale 250 and 500 MW solar projects going in less time.

There is absolutely no way that we are going to utilize “one million acres” in the entire world for solar and wind.

BrightSource, a very large thermal solar plant, will use about two square miles for the entire operation. We won’t build many thermal solar plants.

Wind turbines utilize less than 2% of the total area of a wind farm. The other 98+% remains usable for crops, grazing or wildlife.

For the most part PV solar will go on rooftop and over parking lots and brownfields/landfills. Being close to point of use is a large advantage due to transmission costs.

If you’re a tool of fossil fuel interests take your alarmist junk back to your fossil fuel friends and tell them you failed.

If you’re truly an environmentalist then consider what happens to all the desert if we screw the climate and take away the small amount of rainfall that now maintains the flora and fauna of the desert. Consider the Sahara. Consider what happened in Texas this year.

Like it or not, we’re going to have to break a few eggs in order to not break them all.

The environmental community wants these panels as alternatives to fossil fuels, ok, that’s a good call. I am struggling to afford the money to completely unplug my house from both natural gas for heat and fossil fuel generated electricity from the grid, and am currently building an electric vehicle charged only by solar and wind. But in the process, I am using my rooftop, and a couple of existing patio covers for locating the panels. I see the benefits, but I cannot accept the hypocrisy of the environmentalists when they want to destroy our public lands in order to get their renewable energy when there exists sound alternatives like local point of use generation such as rooftops. Especially when the environmentalists turn around and file lawsuits asking for more mitigation lands, due to the damage these facilities cause to the public lands, as compensation to their cause rather than stopping the projects cold and forcing the government to locate the facilities on rooftops in and around the local points of use.
In any situation, look at who is gaining and what they are gaining before you decide if it’s a good plan or not.

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http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/orange_county&id=8310315

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