I liked the graphic, part of this post at Bloomberg by Dave Merrill, enough that I thought I’d pass it along. Here’s the paragraph right after the graphic:
To be clear, Biden’s plan doesn’t need to entirely rest on wind and solar. Nuclear energy, which requires far less space, is also emission free. Same for hydroelectric power. Plus, wind farms can be installed at sea. Solar panels work wonderfully on rooftops. And plenty of companies are placing bets that fossil-fuel plants can be retrofitted to burn hydrogen or equipped with systems to capture their carbon dioxide emissions.
That’s a widespread misconception. Hydroelectric power can, indeed, produce carbon emissions:
Here we show how carbon intensities of proposed Amazon upland dams (median = 39 kg CO2eq MWh−1, 100-year horizon) are often comparable with solar and wind energy, whereas some lowland dams (median = 133 kg CO2eq MWh−1) may exceed carbon intensities of fossil-fuel power plants.
The standpools behind dams produce lots of methane. In addition the baseline power generation for solar and wind power is generally coal or natural gas which should be taken into account when doing your calculations.
As me auld mither used to say they aren’t making land any more. I would add that using prime farmland for wind or solar power generation is a crime.
If anything and everything everywhere you look has a carbon footprint 👣 and the end of life on earth is a decade or two away and people in authority don’t want to do anything realistic then the hell with the whole damn scam.
It should be pointed the hydroelectric potential of the US was tapped out 75 years ago — there aren’t any Colorado River’s to dam anymore.
Solar panels on top of rooftops don’t work for urban dwellers (ie. not everyone lives in SFH).
Offshore wind turbines don’t take onshore land — but they do take offshore land and that too has an environment cost to the oceans.
I believe nuclear power taking more land than natural gas is misleading. Nuclear is several orders of magnitude denser then fossil fuels — but the US wastes 90% of the energy in the fuel rather than utilizing it (for assorted reasons).
The graph is also semi-tragically focused on the US. Looking at 4 other major polities that produce emissions, Europe, India, China, Japan, all 4 are at least twice the population density as the US; they don’t have the under-utilized land for wind/solar.
China has plenty of under-utilized land; just not where the people are. For those unfamiliar with it (not you) in China most of the population is concentrated in about a third of its territory:
Of course that’s even truer of the U. S. and, I suspect, we’re in the middle of a historic dispersal of population.
Japan’s really the country with problems. Few resources; declining population. At least it will have increasing room for power generation.
“It should be pointed the hydroelectric potential of the US was tapped out 75 years ago — there aren’t any Colorado River’s to dam anymore.”
Not only that, but it’s quite likely the current dams will never be full again and there is a serious threat that the Hoover dam won’t have enough water to generate electricity soon. Quite a change from 1983 when record water almost took out Glen Canyon dam.
Not to mention the foreign policy problems that causes. The Colorado is practically dry by the time it reaches Mexico.
Also unmentioned: we’re actually decreasing the number of dams here in the U. S.
There is “underutilized” land and there is “unusable” land.
As a rough calculation, 1.4 billion people in China / 330 million Americans * 250 million acres of land = 4.3 million square kilometers.
China has 9.7 million square kilometers. So that is half the country(!).
Even Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia add up to 4 million square kilometers only. And much of Tibet, Xinjiang are so harsh that it is highly unlikely one can build a “net energy positive” windmill or solar panel there (at least with current technologies).
The remaining non-densely populated land is in the Northeast which is forest — cutting down forests for solar panels and windmills isn’t a very big win.
That is the key problem and something I’ve been complaining about for decades. Being able to generate power where you don’t need it is extremely wasteful. You’ve got to convert it to move it, convert it back to use it, and there is a massive loss at each of those steps. That and land utilization are among the many reasons I think that small scale modular nukes have more potential than wind or solar.
Not much talk about hydropower so a bit of a red herring. The amount of land these use is of interest but what we really want to know is how much would it use compared to our needs. MIT projected, using older and lower efficiency numbers, that if we went to 100% solar it would take about 33,000 sq km. We devote 10,000 to golf courses for comparison. There really is not shortage of land, and we wont do 100% solar or wind anyway.
https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-solar-energy/
Steve
Based on present land use for wind and solar and how much energy is generated that is a drastic (as in several orders of magnitude) underestimate.
“That and land utilization are among the many reasons I think that small scale modular nukes have more potential than wind or solar.”
We are in the early stage of evaluation of an investment related to this. For obvious reasons I cannot be specific. I can tell you, from what we have learned so far, if anyone with 10 working brain cells, who really, truly fears global warming isn’t throwing themselves at small scale nuclear is either an idiot, has, rather, a total anti-capitalist agenda, or is simply looking for governmental power and taxable sources.
Follow the science (snicker); its not even debatable. And the perceived costs are self inflicted wounds.
Based on 2013 numbers, back when panels were running at about 13% efficiency (closer to 17% now ).
Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.
The US has about 4,000,000 square miles of land. So about 0.5%, but if you account for better efficiency and we wont do 100% solar then maybe 0.1%-0.2%. Non issue.
We have solar and wind energy costs steadily going down and being installed many places. We have zero small scale modular nukes. Hard to support something that doesnt exist yet, costs are unknown and no track record. We should be investing in R&D for them at this point.
Steve
Oops, hit submit too soon. Elon Musk has been pushing the idea that you could do it all with 10,000 sq miles of land. His idea and the above numbers are actually a bit optimistic. The Kamuthi site takes about 4 acres to generate that gigawatt and not the 3.4 above, though the plant opened in 2016. The big California sites (Rosamund?) takes about 5.5 acres but it opened in 2015.
Based on current numbers from functioning plants, no idea how you come up with several orders of magnitude.
Steve
The estimates using 4 petawatts is wrong because that is only what is produced by the electrical grid today. Considering electricity accounts for 30% of total energy consumption (the rest is fossil fuels), so one should 3x the requirements at least — add another 2x on top to handle maintenance, increased demand, decreased production capacity during winter, etc.
The article goes over the assumptions how they came up with land use.
Solar power: Utility scale solar capacity-weighted average is 7.3 acre per megawatt, per NREL. Residential solar panels mounted on rooftops were not added to land-use totals.
Wind power: The direct land-use impact of a single wind turbine foundation and access road is estimated at 1 acre per NREL. The indirect impact or spacing requirements of a wind farm — with multiple turbines —necessitates an additional 60 acres per 1MW of turbine capacity per American Clean Power Association estimates.
The other factor is wind is assumed to generate a substantial amount of energy and it requires a lot of land.
So multiply by 3 and then buy 2 so it was off by a factor of 6. The NREL paper is old and as I noted the newest site I could find, the Kuwaiti site, is actually already generating a gigawatt with 4 acres. Solar panels have increased efficiency since then. So we are probably back at the 3.4 number or close to it. So divide by 2. We are certainly not talking orders of magnitude.
Also, sorry for not making it clear. The claim has been that we could go solar and replace our current generation total using about 20,000 square miles. I think that holds. Of course this is kind of nonsense, as is the whole issue, as we arent going to total solar. Maybe if we had a battery breakthrough. Anyway, the numbers show that land area wont be a restraint in using solar power.
Steve
The chart may not include capacity factors. Except for a few sites with very special conditions, the wind capacity factor is generally around 10%. A few years ago, the Texas PUCO reported an overall wind capacity factor of 8.9%. So the land area for wind power is probably larger than that for hydropower. Solar panels have a similar capacity factor, because of night/day and clouds.
Both turbines and panels have limited life spans and need periodic replacement. I had one neighbor with a broken turbine after about 7 years. They tore down the tower rather than replace it. Another neighbor has just installed panels. We have to see how long they last.
As to small nukes, I raise yet again the issue of economies of scale. Depending on the size of the small reactor, the cost of electricity from it could be as much as 10 times the cost of conventional 1,000 MW plants. Which, of course, is why we have large reactors in the first place
and at this point are not recyclable.
WRT small nukes the economies are in total lifecycle costs from production through restocking.
And no one is mentioning how beautiful solar panel roofs are, in a sort of industrial/factory kind of way, (snicker) or what nice targets they make. Think the advocates might exempt themselves?
Solar and wind are nice, niche options as far as the eye can see. And yet some are stuck in their dogma while a solution is sitting right in front of us.
Makes you wonder. Well, makes some wonder………
The new generation of rooftop solar tiles are sufficiently attractive I’m tempted to have them installed on my home. Particularly if I can get a subsidy for doing so.