Solar power: still the best choice

Thanks to Gar Lipow, I've been hip to solar thermal power and heat storage for a while now, and today I see Joe Romm (former Clinton administration official and blogger) thinks it could save humanity from climate-induced megadeath.

I'm not wild about the idea of covering massive amounts of desert with solar farms -- deserts are ecosystems too! -- but humanity is in survival mode at this point, so desert solar farms and offshore wind (anything that doesn't eat up valuable farmland) are the order of the day. And in any case, the amount of land taken up by solar farms would be less than we currently eat up with oil, coal, and gas infrastructure. Let Appalachia go back to forest, and make Nevada the new Kuwait of solar power.

A corollary to the potential for solar thermal is that Canada really needs to get out of the oil business, now. All of the largest future consumers of oil either have abundant amounts of solar potential within their borders or within 1000km or so, short enough distances to use HVDC cables. China has massive deserts in the west, India is pretty sunny to begin with -- though they might prefer to buy CSP-electricity via a submarine cable from the Arabian desert. Europe is conveniently located just a bit north of the planet's largest desert that isn't dark 6 months of the year, and the US has massive amounts of solar in the southwest. South America has the Patagonian and Atacama deserts, which while smaller deserts could still power 20 America-sized economies. Electric cars are coming, one way or another, and CSP will deliver clean electricity that's cheaper than gasoline. Why we would expect anyone, anywhere to continue to want the dirtiest fossil fuels in existence from Alberta, when there's such an abundant alternative available escapes me.

And of course, we won't have to pave the entire desert with mirrors and steam boilers, because CSP will be only one of many technologies at work -- rooftop solar, offshore wind, (maybe) some biomass. The point remains that 20 years from now, all of our subsidies for tar sands oil will seem like the biggest white elephant in Canadian history. So stop now, and save ourselves the cost.

Comments

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

Waitwaitwait ... back-up. You can put giant amounts of electricity underwater? What happens if the cable ruptures?!?

[Delicious Pundit]

...all of our subsidies for tar sands oil will seem like the biggest white elephant in Canadian history

Mark Messier's Canucks contract is going to be hard to beat.

Wait, this isn't LGM?

[Nate]

We wouldn't need to cover the desert with solar cells if the government gave greater incentives for distributed systems. Every time I fly home to Vegas I see acres and acres of flat roof tops absorbing rays. I've been trying for 2 years to put cells on the roof of two rental houses. If your not wealthy enough to purchase them there is no economical way to install them. If the Feds would guarantee loans for the purchase of cells guaranteed by the power they generate they would propogate like weeds. If I was a rich man I would cover parking lots with retracable thin cells. If you run into the grocery store for 5 minutes your car is 130 degrees when you get back. If they covered the parking lot it would provide shade to keep the cars cool and generate a ton of electricty without taking up any land. If they where to further allow electric cars to plus in while they shop that would just be an added bonus.

[Crissa]

If every house had solar cells on it instead of roofing tar...

...We'd have more than twice as much power as we use now.

And that's just residential.

Who needs huge solar farms? Oh, industry.

Also... Grass and trees should be on those roofs instead of flat acres of black. That'd slow stormwater, clean the air, insulate buildings, and lower the temperature extremes of urban areas.

[dm]

Don't think farms of photovoltaic solar cells --- they're fairly hard to make, and we couldn't produce them fast enough, we couldn't even build factories fast enough to produce them fast enough to replace our current electricity needs in the next fifty years.

It's probably better to think mirrors reflecting sunlight to a tower, which then uses the heat to make steam to power generator turbines. Being situated in desert would make it difficult to get rid of the waste heat (you have to condense that steam to re-use it in the turbines) --- you'd have to radiate it, you couldn't use evaporative cooling. But since all you're doing is getting rid of incident solar heat that would be falling on the ground anyway, you're not producing thermal pollution in the process.