ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

California is at the vanguard of solar power in the U.S., with at least 80 large-scale projects on the drawing board. Concentrated solar power, which is cheaper than silicon panels, is the technology of choice.

Solar thermal electric energy generation concentrates the light from the sun to create heat, and that heat is used to run a heat engine, which turns a generator to make electricity. Solar thermal power costs about 18 cents a kilowatt-hour at present,  roughly 40% cheaper than electricity generated by the silicon-based panels. Improved technology and economies of scale are expected to eventually lower the cost of solar thermal to about 5 cents a kilowatt-hour - about the same as carbon-spewing coal, which generates about half the nation’s electricity.

A solar thermal energy industry report says a great advantage of solar thermal over photovoltaic generation - which directly converts the sun’s light into electricity - is that storing heat is far easier  more efficient, and cheaper than storing electricity. Because of the electricity storage problem, photovoltaic solar panels are only effective during daylight hours, whereas heat can be readily stored during the day and then converted into electricity at night.

Florida has broken ground on a solar-natural gas hybrid system that is the first of its kind, utilizing both solar thermal and an existing combined-cycle natural gas plant. When the sun is not shining,  natural gas will power the turbines.

Industrial-scale solar power plants are being built in Nevada . . .

and across the Atlantic on the Iberian penninsula.

The Tennessee Valley Authority wants 2 gigawatts of renewable power - solar, wind, geothermal or tidal - on the ground by June 2011.

Solar electricity still needs to get to people’s homes. On our existing grid, this means power towers and high-voltage lines. But In Europe, the proposed supergrid would employ high-voltage DC (HVDC) technology and underground transmission lines, sidestepping local opposition to conventional overhead AC transmission lines.

Others complain that solar arrays require space - space that gets a consistent amount of direct sunlight.  Solar thermal power plants typically require 1/4 to 1 square mile or more of land - and change the environment on that land.

But are solar arrays better or worse than . . .

oil fields with their related infrastructure?

Appalachian mountaintop removal?

The rape of Alberta?

Hydropower, which we think of as our most environmentally friendly energy source, in the U.S. has displaced species and devastating ecosystems, turned the Columbia from a mighty river into a series of lakes, and drowned Glen Canyon and the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Solar energy insiders claim that a  patch of desert about 100 miles square could generate enough electricity to meet the entire nation’s demand. Given the alternatives, that sounds pretty benign.

But how credible is this claim? That depends on what is meant by “enough electricity to meet the entire nation’s demand.” Today’s demand? Tomorrow’s demand, assuming energy usage continues to grow at historic rates? What if the transportation sector was to be electrified?

The plausibility of baseload solar power advocates’ claim will be the subject of a future post

The first solar thermal plant in nearly two decades was launched last week in Bakersfield, California. The Carrizo Plains solar plant in Central California will generate enough power for 120,000 homes.

Unlike solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity, this plant will focus sunlight on tubes that contains water. The light heats the water, creating steam, thus turning turbines. Solar thermal plants have an advantage compared to photovoltaic technology because energy can be stored as heat without being converted to another form or relying on batteries.

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Ausra Inc., the developer of utility-scale solar thermal power technology, says the daily and seasonal variation in grid load in the United States matches solar availability and claims solar thermal power could supply over 90% of U.S. grid plus auto fleet.

Robert Rapier at his R-Squared Energy Blog reports on innovative transportation options in India.

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 Here’s the auto rickshaw - essentially an enclosed three-wheeled motorcycle. It supposedly gets 82 mpg.

And now it’s going solar.  The solar version can either be pedaled or run on a 36-volt battery. Yahoo! News reports:

“The fully-charged solar battery will power the rickshaw for 50 to 70 kilometres (30 to 42 miles). Used batteries can be deposited at a centralised solar-powered charging station and replaced for a nominal fee.”

Renewable energy is bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. Achieving a goal of getting 20% of our electricity from wind would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts  pose the same transmission problems.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

Two solar power plants are slated for construction in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest existing plant.

OptiSolar, a company that has just begun making a type of solar panel with a thin film of active material, will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County. The SunPower Corporation, which uses silicon-crystal technology, will build about 250 megawatts at a different location in the same county.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant.

The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

Ikea recently announced it will invest $77 million into research and product development of solar panels, efficiency meters, and energy-efficient lighting. The company hopes to make the products available in the next three to four years.

Here’s the challenge: how to make the installation of a solar panel easy for anyone who can carry a pack of solar panels out of the store? Ikea has 283 stores in 36 countries around the globe. 22 more locations are scheduled to be open by the end of fiscal year 2008.

Yale Environment 360 has an article about a study commissioned by the National Association of Engineers n which Ray Kurzweil and a team of analysts predict that solar could meet 100% of the U.S.’s energy needs within 20 years.

Young companies around the world have developed flexible thin-film solar panels with inexpensive metal or plastic substrates that could be simply and cheaply installed. To date, most p.v. installations have been relatively small arrays attached to individual houses, schools, or commercial buildings. But utility scale installations are also growing. The biggest p.v. technological promise may lie in systems that use mirrors or lenses to concentrate light on highly efficient multi-junction solar cells, vastly leveraging the power of the sun.

Photovoltaics has a competitor in solar thermal, a technology that uses mirrors to concentrate solar heat to produce steam, which can drive a conventional generator. Solar thermal today can provide power for about three times the cost of the cheapest fuel - coal - but with growing manufacturing efficiencies, it should drop in price.

And of course the cost of coal and other fossil fuels doesn’t account for externalities. We face a gathering global warming storm and a host of other problems brought on by combustion run amok.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy says the deserts of the Sahara and Middle East could supply all of Europe’s energy needs.

EU scientists are calling for the creation of a series of huge solar farms - either photovoltaic cells or concentrating solar - and the construction of a new supergrid which would transmit electricity along high voltage direct current cables. The grid would allow European countries such as the UK and Denmark to export wind energy at times of surplus supply and import electricity from green sources including solar from Africa’s deserts.

Scientists calculate an area slightly smaller than Wales could generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity.

And the U.S.? A study by Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, finds that over 90% of fossil fuel–generated electricity in the United States and the majority of U.S. oil usage for transportation could be eliminated using solar thermal power plants - and for less than it would cost to continue importing oil. But all our politicians can manage to do is blather about opening more areas to offshore drilling. Pathetic.

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So now the Portland City Council has unanimously approved a so-called “green” version of the $4.2 billion Columbia River Crossing. The city wants a toll bridge that will accommodate a light rail system and have three automobile lanes in each direction, with a “postcard-worthy design” that will “aesthetically enhance the world-class grandeur of the Columbia River and Mount Hood.”

The Metro Council had earlier approved a version that would include light rail and tolls. The June 5 vote was 5-2, with Carl Hosticka and Robert Liberty voting no.

Conservation groups had argued the bridge would promote sprawl, boost driving and vehicle emissions, and divert transportation money from other local priorities.

But what nobody seemed to realize, friends or foes alike, was that the bridge is already a white elephant. The fuels necessary to power the cars and trucks that it is assumed will be using the bridge simply won’t be there, at any price, at least not in the quantities necessary to support the projected traffic.

The realities of peak oil and depletion rates are unforgiving. It’s notoriously difficult to calculate accurate depletion rates given the lack of good production data about wells, particularly in the Middle East. But it is appearing increasingly likely that production decline rates will prove much greater than expected. The example of Cantarell, the world’s second-greatest oil field ever behind Ghawar, should be sobering. Production at Cantarell is dropping at a rate of 14%. Ironically, horizontal production wells enhance short-term output, but at the cost of precipitous decline rates once peak production is reached.

It is likely that oil will be much more scarce than almost anyone anticipates, and this could be accompanied by unexpected shocking consequences. We need to appreciate that oil, which makes up about 35% of all our total energy consumption, is vital. The electricity produced worldwide needs the indirect input of oil to support and maintain the extraction and transport of ores, fuels, and machinery for our electricity generating infrastructure. One consequence of oil scarcity could be electricity blackouts becoming permanent.

We can’t afford to be wasting precious resources on infrastructure that is already obsolete. If we are to successfully transition to a new energy paradigm, we need to be investing our capital and using our remaining oil to build the new infrastructure.

As Robert Rapier points out at R-Squared Energy Blog, solar is a good place to start.

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The big news on the eve of the Fourth of July holiday has to be a week of inexorable increases in the price of crude oil with the week ending at a record high. Futures today (Thursday July 3) touched $145.85, the highest since trading began in 1983. Both futures and spot prices have been bouncing around above $144 all day. Brent crude, anomalously, is trading at a premium above $145.

The dramatic abandonment of gas guzzlers by American consumers continues.

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Peak oil isn’t just a theory any more. One consequence may be the extinction of the American automobile industry.

There is one rare sign of sanity from D.C. today. The Bureau of Land Management reversed its earlier decision to impose a two-year moratorium on new solar developments on public land. BLM has relented and will process applications while at the same time studying the environmental impacts of large-scale solar development on public land in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

What about the deserts of Oregon? Southeast Oregon and southwestern Idaho have great potential.

We’ll be heading for Sacramento (via Amtrak) over the holiday, so posting will be light or even nonexistent until Tuesday.

A posting titled “Energy Transitions Past and Future” by Cutler Cleveland at The Oil Drum contains a sobering tidbit about the scale of the challenge we face in replacing fossil fuels:

“Consider what it would take today to replace even just one-half of U.S. fossil fuel use with renewable energy: we would need to displace coal and petroleum energy flows of 2.9 TW, or 32 times the amount of coal used in 1885. Current global fossil fuel use is about 13 TW, so we need more than 6 TW of renewable energies to replace 50% of all fossil fuels. This is a staggering shift.”

But there is a ray of sunshine:

“The only renewable energy that exceeds annual global fossil fuel use is direct solar radiation, which is several orders of magnitudes larger than fossil fuel use.”

Energy quality is key - and energy density is a key measure of quality. Power density is the rate of energy production per unit of the earth’s area, usually expressed in watts per square meter (W/m2). Fossil fuel deposits are an extraordinarily concentrated source of high-quality, high-density energy. The high power densities of energy systems have enabled the increasing concentration of human activity.

A solar-based system will require “a profound spatial restructuring with major environmental and socioeconomic consequences.” That’s our challenge - to anticipate those consequences as best we can and develop policies and programs to ease a transition compelled by climate change - and, of course, the peaking of oil production, soon to be followed by natural gas and coal.

From MIT Press:

“A team led by MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world–one team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.

“The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000–creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.”

Such dishes could be mass produced by the thousands and set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce. One of the keys to an inexpensive design is smaller is better. Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area. The key in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world.

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 Mish’s Global Economic Trends Analysis images

The New York Times reports that the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

Much of the 119 million surface acres of federally administered land in the West is ideal for solar energy, particularly in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, where sunlight drenches vast, flat desert tracts.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress comments:

• Drilling for oil and gas, even in pristine areas — hey, we’re former oil company executives.
• Leveling mountains in beautiful West Virginia — we’re all for it.
• Toxic metals from mining — bring ‘em on!
• Logging old-growth forests — what so you think forests are for?

Solar companies have filed more than 130 proposals with the Bureau of Land Management since 2005. They center on the companies’ desires to lease public land to build solar plants and then sell the energy to utilities. According to the bureau, the applications, which cover more than one million acres, are for projects that have the potential to power more than 20 million homes.

All involve two types of solar plants, concentrating and photovoltaic. Concentrating solar plants use mirrors to direct sunlight toward a synthetic fluid, which powers a steam turbine that produces electricity. Photovoltaic plants use solar panels to convert sunlight into electric energy.

The industry is already concerned over the fate of federal solar investment tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress renews them. The moratorium, combined with an end to tax credits, would deal a double blow to solar power.

The biggest effect of Sunday’s conference in Jeddah was to bring to the world’s attention the stark reality of the immanence of peak oil.  So what if Saudi Arabia is able to increase production to 12.5 mbd within a couple of years?  Nearly verybody else’s production will still be declining.  The net effect, at best, would be to maintain current levels of production for a few more years before the final descent begins. Coal and oil aren’t far behind on the depletion curve, and (safety and cost problems aside) neither is nuclear.  What to do?

Ted Nace at Gristmill reminds us that an area of about 100 x 100 miles (10,000 square miles) of solar thermal power - utility-scale arrays of mirrors that create heat and then electricity - could supply 100% of US electric power, day and night.

That’s not an insignificant amount of land - but it’s a lot less than we currently use for other purposes. Robert Rapier has calculated only about half that amount of land would be required - an area about the size of Los Angeles County.

Joseph Romm has posted photos at Climate Progress  showing what a solar thermal array looks like:

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Gar Lipow at Gristmill does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and concludes that solar uses far less land than coal.

“Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity.”

His calculations are based on a 20-year period. But the need to mine coal goes on forever, whereas a solar facility can occupy the same footprint forever. And then you have to also consider the environmental impacts.

A new DOE report - “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply” - concludes that it’s feasible for wind energy to contribute one-fifth of the total U.S. electricity supply by 2030.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress lists the key conclusions:

• Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.
• Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
• No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
• This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles of wind resource [new nuclear is currently about 15 cents/kwh (see here)].
• The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of as little as $43 billion NPV [net present value] more than the base-case no new Wind Scenario. This would represent less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household

Romm says that key benefit is that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25% in 2030. But this isn’t such good news after all - avoided emissions would merely “nearly level projected growth in CO2 emissions from the electricity sector.”

In other words, emissions would continue to grow - just not as much as they otherwise would. We would be far from on track to meet the 80% reductions necessary to keep atmospheric CO2 at ~450 ppm, much less the level of reductions necessary to stabilize CO2 at 350 ppm, the level necessary to avoid an unacceptable risk of climate catastrophe.

Robert Rapier at R-Squared Energy Blog has undertaken to calculate whether it would be feasible to use solar power to generate enough energy to offset all U.S. gasoline consumption. He concludes that it will take about 444,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity. Current U.S. generating capacity is over 900,000 megawatts - but there’s little to spare.

He calculates that to generate 444,000 megawatts with solar PV would require just under 1,300 square miles (a 36 mile by 36 mile square) of just PV surface area. To generate that much power with solar thermal - including supporting infrastructure - would require 4,719 square miles (a 69 mile by 69 mile square).

A large area, but not impossible to envision. That’s almost exactly the area of Los Angeles County - and we’ve easily covered pretty much all of that area with built environment.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece suggesting that concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) could prove to be the answer to our energy (and climate) crises.

Now Joseph Romm has a long article on CSP in Salon, “The technology that will save humanity: The solar energy you haven’t heard of is the one best suited to generate clean electricity for generations to come.” He has a brief summary and these photos at his blog Climate Progress.

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Romm gets to the bottom line of why CSP is so important:

“Because it’s the only form of clean electricity that can meet all the demanding requirements of this century . . “

Five solar-thermal power plants - capable of generating 900 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 540,000 homes each year, are slated to be built in the Mojave Desert. BrightSource Energy will build the plants, and Pacific Gas and Electric has contracted to buy the power.

Nine solar plants were built in the Mojave Desert between 1984 and 1990 and are still operating.

The inherent problem with conventional photovoltaic cells is that they are composed of silicon. Although abundant in the form of silicon dioxide (say, from sand), the pure element requires considerable energy to extract. Analysts differ somewhat in their estimates, but the consensus is that it takes about three years for a conventional silicon photovoltaic panel and the equipment associated with it (the rigid frame used to mount it and the power-conditioning electronics that attach it to the grid) to produce the amount of electrical energy required to manufacture this equipment in the first place—assuming that it is set up in a reasonably sunny spot.

Fortunately, alternative strategies exist for making photovoltaic cells using much less energy, and one promising example is now beginning to be made in significant quantities.

“Dye-sensitized” solar cell uses a combination of titanium dioxide (a component found in many paints) and an organic dye molecule, often a compound containing ruthenium, which are together immersed in a liquid electrolyte. Instead of coming off the assembly line in discrete, rigid units, the dye-sensitized cells are placed on half-mile-long rolls of flexible metal foil.

ECN Solar Energy, an independent photovoltaic-research firm in the Netherlands, has estimated that such dye-sensitized cells installed in southern Europe would have an energy payback time of only a half-year or so.