While I certainly welcome lower-cost solar panels, and would most certainly include solar power when I own my off-grid homestead, I am deeply concerned about the tens of thousands, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of acres of land being developed for industrial solar farms across the state. Information both on solar farms and smaller, more appropriate uses of solar technology.
This visualization shows the amount of solar intensity (also called solar insolation and measured in watts per square meter) all across the globe as a function of time of day and day of year. This is an idealized calculation as it does not take into account reductions in solar intensity due to cloud cover or other things that might block the sun from reaching the earth (e.g dust and pollution).
I spend too much time dreaming about how renewable energy projects and the climate emergency will be used to punish political opponents in the coming decades. After all, during an emergency there is no time to be thoughtful or care about people of color or the poor.
How would you react if you turned on the news on Tuesday morning to only find out your house and entire neighborhood had been condemned under the state’s quick take eminent domain law, for a large renewable energy project by a private developer?
The state would compensate you for fair market value and moving expenses but you would have to moved out of your home within 30 days. By filing a quick take deed with the county clerk, the state had already taken title to your property, your only choice is to take the check the government is sending you or sue in the court of claims for additional compensation based on what you believe the fair market value is to be.
In theory, homeowners and other property owners could band together and sue the state under Article 78 arguing that the project was arbitrary and capricious under the law but you could not challenge the individual eminent domain as quick take can not challenged in court. But even there, everything was stacked up against you as the state had decided building renewable energy projects was their priority, and the state with its millions in resources had no interest in defending homeowners and farms against big solar.
Solar and wind energy in many ways is the next interstate highway system. The climate crisis is already unlocking the next generation of Robert Moses and the master builders. The solar or wind farm must be built, the hell with the environment or community. A crisis affords no time to consider such impacts, the outcome has been predetermined by government officials. The bulldozers must come, the cement laid, steel I beams set and the thousand of acres of silicon and glass panels set into place.
I have a friend who visited a CalTrans office during the 1960s, and said the experience was like visiting a war room filled with enormous maps that filled the walls detailing the planned superhighways. The walls were certainly backed by stacks of files that contained detail survey data and rooms of super computers and reels of magnetic tape that would be used to crank out letters and prefilled out checks to owners of condemned property for compensation without much human intervention. Cold hard, statistics and FHWA regulations basically predetermined the route after all.
With massive government subsidies and the climate crisis the renewable energy projects must go ahead without question or significant evaluation of environmental impacts. The future has been predetermined by the planners, there is no turning back, we are told. Historic buildings must be hauled off to the landfills, forests stripped of their timber, farm fields stripped of their soils and concreted, open space industrialized. There are good union jobs, tax revenue, campaign contributions and patronage jobs after all to fill.
At least I’m glad to hear that local governments are asking solar developers about decommissioning plans, requiring some kind of bonding and calculations on landfill space to dispose of the panels when their time is done, not imagine they will be recycled into pixie dust. But no time to focus on that, the tax revenue and campaign contributions are more important than community character in a fucking climate crisis.
While I’m sure it won’t be popular, I sure hope people do rise up and ask before it’s to late:
The average sized 100MW solar farm hosting around 300,000 to +400,000 solar panels (modules) will generally have over 1,000,000 physical made electrical terminations. Each one of these terminations operates at around 1500 Volts and each termination could fail.
Electrical equipment failure is well known to be linked to situations where we can observe abnormally high temperatures. Fire, sparking, arching or melting exposes electrical equipment to further damage and degradation exacerbated as moisture ingress occurs. Electrical failure can occur due to various factors and although the commonly seen issue will generally arise due to high resistive joints it is not uncommon to observe how the environment impacts equipment overtime. Electrical termination temperatures can reach over 120° Celsius, under these conditions, equipment will begin to deteriorate, over time plastics will have already begun to deform or melt and visible signs or smells will be present. Mismanagement, poor quality equipment and installation practices or lack of scheduled maintenance is generally what leads to these situations. Thorough and regular maintenance procedures can control these issues including addressing performance degradation, system dropouts, inverter failure/faults and lost yield.
Been investigating capacity factors for solar farms in New York. The math isn’t hard, as you just have to get production data from the Electricity data browser, divided by the number of hours in a month, and then by the nameplate capacity of the power plant.
For example, for DG Bethlehem Solar West at Selkirk Railyard is a 1,000 kW nameplate industrial solar facility, but in reality the output is far below nameplate as there is night time, clouds, and snow. This facility has a capacity factor of 18.7% or about 187 kW average output. But the capacity factor rises to closer to 30% during the June and July but falls to around 8% in December and January.
A comparison could be made to PSEG Bethlehem Energy Center, a natural gas plant with a nameplate capacity of 893,100 kW nameplate with a capacity factor of 69.2% or an average output of 580,731 kW. This could be higher, but it’s a mid-market plant so they shut it down or run it at reduced output during times of low-energy demand.
To generate as much electricity PSEG Bethlehem Energy Center over the April 2016 – December 2019 time period, it would have taken 3,100 industrial solar facilities the size of DG Bethlehem Solar West.
