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One important thing missing from this equation is: What are our options?
1. Reduce our use of energy (like that is ever going to happen)
2. Burn more fossil fuels at an ever increasing security and environmental cost.
when you look at it in perspective the environmental impact of a solar power plant is far better than the alternatives.
As for water to clean up the dirt, how hard can it be to recycle it? sand filters can clean back the water. It's not like we're drinking out of the mirrors, it will just be for cleaning, right?
How about just putting panels on all the big box store roofs in California. That would go a long way to replacing huge desert based facilities without harming anything. If the stores got a cut it might help them stave off bankrupcy and keep some people employed. Not to mention some installation work spread throughout the state if managed correctly.
As a Californian concerned about global warming and local habitats, it's obvious the solution isn't mega stations. It's local regional stations where they can fit. This country is heading into a civil war's worth of fights over land, water and resources. The solution will be all of us protecting what's most important and taking on the responsibilities of our own power needs. NIMBY-ism often sucks, but it also can be a form self preservation.
Decentralized rooftop solar should be our first stop on this trip.
@Brain: The point is that there's a bunch of brain-dead people out there who don't want you to do ANYTHING. They'd prefer, in fact, that most humans would just die off and leave nature to the animals.
Unfortunately, they don't seem inclined to lead the way by dying off first...
Make a difference and tell Sen. Feinstein what you think of her plan:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUS.EmailMe
@Sean Meredith
The only way to go solar in the gigawatt range is with large scale power plants. Some people might just not get it...they think that if a few hundred big box stores go solar it will do the job, when in fact these installations aren't even enough to satisfy the store's energy use. It is part of the solution, but its impact is a tiny fraction of the amount of solar power needed to cover our needs.
Our energy consumption is huge, and the only way to counter it is with huge solar power plants in the desert. Compare that to coal or nuclear plants, if you think those are a viable, long term solution.
Sean, you're wrong, your claim that the solution is solar panels on roofs of large retail outlets, is absolutely wrong.
In fact, they product only 1/3 to 1/2 of the store's power!
Seeing people 'stand up' to protect the desert land is absurd, do you really prefer breathing coal fumes or living near a nuclear plant? Do you prefer the status quo?
I don't know how anyone can be against solar energy. I recently built a few solar panels for my home and my bills have already gone down significantly. This is a great, natural source of energy that will allow our environment to grow and thrive.
"or living near a nuclear plant? "
I've lived near one for the last 10 years. I would take a second one if they would get rid of a coal plant or two in return.
Unfortunately not enough people realize the reality is how much coal or how much nuclear we will have, not should we have either one of those. We are going to have both, pick which one is the least bad.
No, a better, more intelligent solution is to consume less.
Along with energy efficiency, small scale grid connect solar power *can* supply all we need. In Australia, there's enough roof space to power the country and I'm assuming it's the same in the USA. Our towns and cities are incredibly under-utilized in this respect and by generating power closer to where it will be used also dramatically decreases line loss; which in turn will also decrease the heat related blackouts we're increasing seeing. We need to think past just putting panels on big-box stores, this needs to extend to every suitable rooftop.
The plants planned for the dessert are so called thermal power stations. This means that mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight to heat up some medium (oil, molten salt, dependent on the kind of system) and thismedium in its turn heat up water to produce steam which drives a conventional steam turbine. This only works economically on a grand scale and cannot be mounted on a roof.
What can be mounted on roofs are photovoltaic panels which directly converts the energy in sunlight. However this is (still) a more expensive way to produce electricity.
Overall, impactless electricity production does not exist. We can only choose the lesser evil. Considering the clear and present danger of climate change we do not have the luxury to sit on our bottom until a electricity technology presents itself that is cheap and that nobody objects to. We have to take what we can get.
Finally compared to mountain top removal the impact of solar thermal power plants is minimal and also reversible.
Michael is right. The reason energy companies do not want to utilize rooftops is because they can charge more $$$$ if they aren't using your rooftop. Heck, if they're using your rooftop, you might not want to pay your bill!
Every rooftop should have solar panels; big businesses and even small homes. In turn, we must consume less energy, and some of that starts with better design of some electrical products. And I'm sure we can design solar panels with mirrors on rooftops - who uses their rooftop on a daily basis anyway?
People think just because it's a desert, it's not a thriving eco-system, but it is. Let's not cut off the nose to save the face.
Cleaning the panels would employ people, and you could use compressed air.
Regarding the cleaning: Why not use compressed air? Since it's just dry desert dust, this should work alright.
Alternatively, electrostatically charge the panels or mirrors and then just run an oppositely charged cloth or brush over them.
You don't necessarily need water to clean things.
Why do I hear so little about heat mining. That could be set up with little impact on the surface other than possible earthquakes. However, with care this problem could be minimized. We could run heat mining plants 24-7 wheather the sun shines or not; wheather the wind blows or not.
Ausra's new solar plant uses 1 square mile and will have a capacity of 177 MW. That's roughly 6 square miles per gigawatt. In the US, we need about 2500 GW of renewable energy altogether, or 1000 GW to replace current electric power plus 1500 GW for transportation, industrial, commercial buildings, and residential buildings. That's 15000 square miles of collectors. If this were all built in one spot, it would be a square 122 miles on each edge. Extermination of every living thing in an area of desert that size isn't really a big deal when compared to other human activities. Agriculture and road building, for example, dwarf the negative environmental impact of solar energy. It's rather insignificant, and even less significant when the solar collectors are distributed widely in smaller areas. This is a non-problem. It should be ignored completely.
I looked up Lake Mead in Wikipedia. The surface area is 248 square miles. Hoover dam has a capacity of 2.08 GW. That's 119 square miles of desert flooded per GW. Compare that to 6 square miles of desert covered with mirrors per GW for solar energy production. That's roughly a 20 to 1 ratio.
I do not consider Lake Mead to be a destroyed canyon. A lake in a desert is almost always an improvement over dry rock. Likewise, a solar power plant is a big improvement over dirt. But even if you consider this damage, its the most minor damage that you can do and still have electric power. Learn to love it.
How does the land use of a solar power plant compare to the land use of agricultural biofuel production?
How does the water consumption of an air-cooled solar power plant (the best kind to build) compare with the water consumption of agricultural biofuel production?
If you have answers, please tell. I would really like to know.