Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 06/08/2011 10:25:48 AM PDT by reaganaut1
IN April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates. President Obama and several members of Congress have supported one at the federal level. Polls routinely show strong support among voters for renewable energy projects — as long as they don’t cost too much.
But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.
Consider California’s new mandate. The state’s peak electricity demand is about 52,000 megawatts. Meeting the one-third target will require (if you oversimplify a bit) about 17,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. Let’s assume that California will get half of that capacity from solar and half from wind. Most of its large-scale solar electricity production will presumably come from projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California. When completed, Ivanpah, which aims to provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, will cover 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.
The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Reality is a bitch. To delusional liberals/progressives/leftists.
global warming / “renewable” energy ping
Lets not forget that the EPA just SHUTDOWN CONSTRUCTION on the boondoggle plant in the desert 2 weeks ago, They are NOT ALLOWED TO RELOCATE ANY MORE TORTOISES.
I believe the phrase is “hoisted on their own petard.”
Hey California - Stand by for massive rolling blackouts, not merely the brownouts you “enjoyed” before.
Because we could not acquire a utility easement for our rural home we put in our own power plant. We have a 9.3 kW solar array to serve our 2700 sq ft Texas home. But we also have $27,000 worth of batteries (2006 prices) to store power. Talk about natural resources— just think about mining all that lead. And this is not to mention the big propane backup generator or the costs to build the building to house all of this.
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