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As many of you know, I have spent the better part of the last two years from my seat on the BLM's Desert Advisory Council [DAC] challenging the Federal government's latest efforts to designate almost two million acres of the California Desert as Development Focus Areas [DFA's] for potential renewable energy development. In a nutshell, opponents [which include me] have challenged California's component participation in President Obama's Climate Action Plan [CAP], which is referred to as the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan [DRECP] for a number of reasons. Here are the ones that are most significant to me.
1. The plan is stale. This plan was originally developed in 2009 in a worthy effort to establish a better understanding and management of desert ecosystems [rather than making fragmented development decisions that would NEVER make proper accounting for cumulative impacts] as well as providing developers with a level playing field in which to make proposals that could be streamlined by having desert-wide quantifiable goals for species and habitat protection. However, we all know that commerce is dynamic, and as the original three year vision for creating the DRECP bloated into seven [and counting!] years, developers with money to spend have simply looked for ways to get around it. The uncertainty of it's legal future stands as a secondary impediment to developers actually making us of what seemed like, seven years ago, a good idea.
2. The plan is not really 'green' at all.
2a. Water. This has been one of my biggest heartburns, so I list it first, even though it has not been first on most participant's list. To meet the plan's 20,000MegaWatt target will require approximately 40 projects of an average of 4000 acres per project. Contrary to the imagination of those who spend no time there, the desert is neither flat or smooth. Every one of these projects would require substantial grading for roads and siting equipment. Grading makes dust. EPA dust control requirements for typical desert soils will require 500,000,000 gallons of water JUST FOR DUST CONTROL. Per project. That's 20 BILLION GALLONS to fully implement the plan.
And this is not water that is trucked in from some other place. That's too expensive. This water will come from ancient aquifers under or near these sites. Water that accumulated over the course of 16-17 million years. Water that will not likely be replaced by any known hydrologic process within the next millennium. And this proposal comes on the cusp of what could well be an altithermal, an extended drought with a precedent of lasting as much as 300 years.
Conversely, if solar projects were built in the cities, there would be almost no water required for dust control. Hmmm. Let's think about this.
2b. Carbon. The purpose of creating renewable energy projects is to try and lessen the carbon footprint of people's energy needs that would otherwise be met by carbon-producing methods. The 'dirty little secret' of wind and solar generating technologies is that if you add up the ENERGY costs of manufacturing the wind turbines or solar panels, the transportation ENERGY costs of moving them from where they are made to where they will be used, and the siting ENERGY costs that it will take to construct the project on a desert site, that total energy cost is estimated to eat up about the first 15 years of what those projects will produce in energy. That's basically saying 15 years to break even...before you ever flip the switch to turn them on.
That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for a related estimate that these technologies only have a life expectancy of 20 years. Simple math says that's 75% of the value.
And it hasn't accounted for the ENERGY cost of transmission, getting that energy from remote locations where it is proposed to be generated to the cities where it will be used. Basically 100 miles of new transmission lines would have to be built, at an estimated dollar cost of $2,000,000,000 to get this 'green' electricity from point to point. I don't know what additional percentage of ENERGY cost BUILDING these additional transmission lines would cost, but I suspect it pretty much cancels out the remaining value of these projects, making them carbon neutral.
If this 'feel good' project was simply carbon neutral, it might still be somewhat palatable as another job-creating government subsidy. However, the carbon cost analysis is not complete.
The vast majority of desert soil is composed of a hard-pack substance commonly referred to as caliche, calcium carbonate. There's that carbon word again. It is no coincidence that carbon is a major component of caliche. Caliche is not on the Table of Elements as a primary building block. It is a product of a biological process. Micro-organisms in the desert soil actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, pulling it down exactly the same way trees and plants do. They produce accumulations of sub-surface caliche. People are much more familiar with the idea of ocean reefs, formed by coral polyps. Coral reefs are accumulations of calcium carbonate.
Monitoring technology developed with in the last two years has provided data that indicates the micro-organisms in typical desert strata sequester carbon at TWO THIRDS THE RATE OF A TROPICAL RAIN FOREST. And everyone understands the value of a rainforest to the earth's atmosphere.
Conversely, scraping 177,000 acres of the desert to build 'green' energy projects will destroy many if not most of these micro-organisms, along with their ability to perform this beneficial function. Their adaptability in the wake of a bulldozer blade is not known. Preliminary study of lands disturbed by grading has not been encouraging.
Then there is the simple fact that this now unearthed carbon has lost much of the bonding that kept it stable, in place. Dust control is not a perfect science. And while silica remains the primary particulate component of dust, this disturbed land will undoubtedly result in having a lot of carbon being returned to the atmosphere. A truly sad irony.
2c. Biology. As I stated earlier, the DRECP has been an enormous benefit to getting a much better understanding of desert flora, fauna and ecosystems. The federal agencies that gather data and formulate management plans for protecting these things have been perpetually underfunded, save for the intermittent PR opportunities like sage grouse or the vole. With the impetus of creating a plausibly 'safe' baseline for encouraging further development, serious money was put into gathering and analyzing data on flora, fauna and ecosystems. In my estimation, science that would have taken 20 years to gather under normal funding paradigms was accelerated and compressed into a 5 year period starting in 2007 and ending in 2012. We refer to this phenomenon as political will.
However, we know that science is a constantly evolving process of replacing good information with better information. Partially in response to the DRECP, the science of desert flora, fauna and ecosystems has been put on many more scientist's radar screens, and the momentum created by the DRECP has not diminished. What that means is that while the government had to 'close the door' at some point, establishing A baseline on which to make planning decisions, the ACTUAL data the government COULD have used has continued to progress, quickly eroding the value under which planning assumptions and ultimate decisions were made...in 2009. While SOME of the science can still readily be incorporated into management decisions when specific projects are proposed, some of it, like the caliche analysis, did not exist then, and fundamentally fractures the foundation on which planning assumptions were made, thereby undermining the value of several key planning decisions in the plan.
We would incur none of these 'green' costs if we sited solar in the city.
3. The plan institutionalizes old technologies at the expense of emerging technologies. The vast majority of energy planners today will tell you that the energy paradigm exemplified by the TVA [the first large-scale energy plan of the 1930s] is a planning nightmare of inefficiency, and that nobody in their right mind would imitate it. Yet that is exactly what our government has authorized and encouraged for the last eighty years. DRECP exacerbates that nightmare by committing the next thirty years of development to the same flawed strategy of remote siting, ridiculously unnecessary transmission costs, and ridiculously inefficient energy transmission losses caused solely by remote siting.
Further, DRECP effectively discourages other technologies by only offering the direct and indirect benefits of siting in the areas, and under the conditions identified by the plan. For as 'green' as wind turbines and photo-voltaic panels arguably are [see discussion above]
they are not as green as some of the technologies on the horizon, either by breaking the current inefficiencies of manufacture, transportation, siting and transmission costs, or simply by offering options with increased longevity. By incentivising a handful of 'old-school' existing energy technologies, DRECP strikes an eerie parallel to the accusations thrown at the oil, gas and automotive industries regarding the development of alternative vehicles.
There are other science-based objections. These will suffice for Part 1.
1. The plan is stale. This plan was originally developed in 2009 in a worthy effort to establish a better understanding and management of desert ecosystems [rather than making fragmented development decisions that would NEVER make proper accounting for cumulative impacts] as well as providing developers with a level playing field in which to make proposals that could be streamlined by having desert-wide quantifiable goals for species and habitat protection. However, we all know that commerce is dynamic, and as the original three year vision for creating the DRECP bloated into seven [and counting!] years, developers with money to spend have simply looked for ways to get around it. The uncertainty of it's legal future stands as a secondary impediment to developers actually making us of what seemed like, seven years ago, a good idea.
2. The plan is not really 'green' at all.
2a. Water. This has been one of my biggest heartburns, so I list it first, even though it has not been first on most participant's list. To meet the plan's 20,000MegaWatt target will require approximately 40 projects of an average of 4000 acres per project. Contrary to the imagination of those who spend no time there, the desert is neither flat or smooth. Every one of these projects would require substantial grading for roads and siting equipment. Grading makes dust. EPA dust control requirements for typical desert soils will require 500,000,000 gallons of water JUST FOR DUST CONTROL. Per project. That's 20 BILLION GALLONS to fully implement the plan.
And this is not water that is trucked in from some other place. That's too expensive. This water will come from ancient aquifers under or near these sites. Water that accumulated over the course of 16-17 million years. Water that will not likely be replaced by any known hydrologic process within the next millennium. And this proposal comes on the cusp of what could well be an altithermal, an extended drought with a precedent of lasting as much as 300 years.
Conversely, if solar projects were built in the cities, there would be almost no water required for dust control. Hmmm. Let's think about this.
2b. Carbon. The purpose of creating renewable energy projects is to try and lessen the carbon footprint of people's energy needs that would otherwise be met by carbon-producing methods. The 'dirty little secret' of wind and solar generating technologies is that if you add up the ENERGY costs of manufacturing the wind turbines or solar panels, the transportation ENERGY costs of moving them from where they are made to where they will be used, and the siting ENERGY costs that it will take to construct the project on a desert site, that total energy cost is estimated to eat up about the first 15 years of what those projects will produce in energy. That's basically saying 15 years to break even...before you ever flip the switch to turn them on.
That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for a related estimate that these technologies only have a life expectancy of 20 years. Simple math says that's 75% of the value.
And it hasn't accounted for the ENERGY cost of transmission, getting that energy from remote locations where it is proposed to be generated to the cities where it will be used. Basically 100 miles of new transmission lines would have to be built, at an estimated dollar cost of $2,000,000,000 to get this 'green' electricity from point to point. I don't know what additional percentage of ENERGY cost BUILDING these additional transmission lines would cost, but I suspect it pretty much cancels out the remaining value of these projects, making them carbon neutral.
If this 'feel good' project was simply carbon neutral, it might still be somewhat palatable as another job-creating government subsidy. However, the carbon cost analysis is not complete.
The vast majority of desert soil is composed of a hard-pack substance commonly referred to as caliche, calcium carbonate. There's that carbon word again. It is no coincidence that carbon is a major component of caliche. Caliche is not on the Table of Elements as a primary building block. It is a product of a biological process. Micro-organisms in the desert soil actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground, pulling it down exactly the same way trees and plants do. They produce accumulations of sub-surface caliche. People are much more familiar with the idea of ocean reefs, formed by coral polyps. Coral reefs are accumulations of calcium carbonate.
Monitoring technology developed with in the last two years has provided data that indicates the micro-organisms in typical desert strata sequester carbon at TWO THIRDS THE RATE OF A TROPICAL RAIN FOREST. And everyone understands the value of a rainforest to the earth's atmosphere.
Conversely, scraping 177,000 acres of the desert to build 'green' energy projects will destroy many if not most of these micro-organisms, along with their ability to perform this beneficial function. Their adaptability in the wake of a bulldozer blade is not known. Preliminary study of lands disturbed by grading has not been encouraging.
Then there is the simple fact that this now unearthed carbon has lost much of the bonding that kept it stable, in place. Dust control is not a perfect science. And while silica remains the primary particulate component of dust, this disturbed land will undoubtedly result in having a lot of carbon being returned to the atmosphere. A truly sad irony.
2c. Biology. As I stated earlier, the DRECP has been an enormous benefit to getting a much better understanding of desert flora, fauna and ecosystems. The federal agencies that gather data and formulate management plans for protecting these things have been perpetually underfunded, save for the intermittent PR opportunities like sage grouse or the vole. With the impetus of creating a plausibly 'safe' baseline for encouraging further development, serious money was put into gathering and analyzing data on flora, fauna and ecosystems. In my estimation, science that would have taken 20 years to gather under normal funding paradigms was accelerated and compressed into a 5 year period starting in 2007 and ending in 2012. We refer to this phenomenon as political will.
However, we know that science is a constantly evolving process of replacing good information with better information. Partially in response to the DRECP, the science of desert flora, fauna and ecosystems has been put on many more scientist's radar screens, and the momentum created by the DRECP has not diminished. What that means is that while the government had to 'close the door' at some point, establishing A baseline on which to make planning decisions, the ACTUAL data the government COULD have used has continued to progress, quickly eroding the value under which planning assumptions and ultimate decisions were made...in 2009. While SOME of the science can still readily be incorporated into management decisions when specific projects are proposed, some of it, like the caliche analysis, did not exist then, and fundamentally fractures the foundation on which planning assumptions were made, thereby undermining the value of several key planning decisions in the plan.
We would incur none of these 'green' costs if we sited solar in the city.
3. The plan institutionalizes old technologies at the expense of emerging technologies. The vast majority of energy planners today will tell you that the energy paradigm exemplified by the TVA [the first large-scale energy plan of the 1930s] is a planning nightmare of inefficiency, and that nobody in their right mind would imitate it. Yet that is exactly what our government has authorized and encouraged for the last eighty years. DRECP exacerbates that nightmare by committing the next thirty years of development to the same flawed strategy of remote siting, ridiculously unnecessary transmission costs, and ridiculously inefficient energy transmission losses caused solely by remote siting.
Further, DRECP effectively discourages other technologies by only offering the direct and indirect benefits of siting in the areas, and under the conditions identified by the plan. For as 'green' as wind turbines and photo-voltaic panels arguably are [see discussion above]
they are not as green as some of the technologies on the horizon, either by breaking the current inefficiencies of manufacture, transportation, siting and transmission costs, or simply by offering options with increased longevity. By incentivising a handful of 'old-school' existing energy technologies, DRECP strikes an eerie parallel to the accusations thrown at the oil, gas and automotive industries regarding the development of alternative vehicles.
There are other science-based objections. These will suffice for Part 1.
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