I sent the following letter to Jerry Brown. Maybe you would like to send something similar or along the same lines.
Honorable Governor Brown,
The question that immediately came to mind by everyone concerning energy is whether or not it is feasible to reach the goal in nine years.
I believe it is totally feasible as long as it is NOT done with very large desert power plants. There are many significant problems with the proposed desert power plants - including environmental hurdles, high costs, high power costs, need for new transmission lines, and others. These will all get in the way of meeting your goal.
However, instead of the State and Feds putting up billions in grants and financial support for a few large companies to help them destroy the deserts and jack up the price of electricity to consumers - go small and put the same money into supporting small locally produced and used systems (rooftops, parking lots, etc) - net metering plus the ability to sell back extra power at wholesale electricity prices.
Small systems have little or no environmental impact (because they are installed on locations that are already impacted); require no new power lines (because they decrease the power on the grid, not increase it); save the consumer money (because they make their own power for free rather than purchase all of their power from the utilities); are more affordable (because the local owner is more willing to invest when they can get a direct savings); are faster to install (because of little or no need for exhaustive permitting, environmental impact reports, design and construction of new power grid, etc); and create far more jobs (because they require about 10-20 times as much local labor as big centralized power plants).
The according to the news media, government is already offering grants to the large power plants of about $5/installed watt plus giving them almost free land, plus giving them tax breaks for the power they produce, plus giving them rate hikes for their new power, plus helping to pay for new transmission lines. Give the $5/watt to homeowners and small businesses and solar will blossom without the need for any of the extra "Plus costs."
If given incentives close to those proposed from the large (German, Spanish and Chinese owned) power plants, local solar will meet the goals within five years without a negative environmental impact - while saving the consumer billions of dollars a year.
If you persist in going with the large centralized power plants, the costs will sky rocket; there will be extensive delays because of environmental impacts (especially when the public realizes that you are talking about hundreds of square miles of desert environment being totally destroyed by leveling, paved with gravel, sprayed with herbicides and fenced off from all wildlife); there will be massive problems with creating the temporary infrastructures to support a short term burst of workers during construction; they will severely impact the water supplies in the desert communities during construction and operation; and the will require building many new high tension transmission lines. I believe it is unlikely that all of these obstacles, and others, can be overcome in time to meet your schedule deadline of 2020.
There are enough rooftops in California to meet 100% of California's electrical energy needs. If all 6,540,000 single family dwellings were to install solar electrical systems, that would produce over 125,000 gwhr/yr of power. We currently use a total of 129, 000 gwhr/yr of electrical power and are making 42,000 from installed renewable sources (other than large hyrdro). Add business roofs, parking lots, and other similar locations and the amount of space and power produced is far in excess of 100% of the total power needs for the State.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Desert Solar
I happened to be listening to the PBS news today and heard an interesting, and infuriating, bit concerning a proposed new solar power plant for the Mojave Desert in Southern California. This new power plant is supposed to be able to power 85,000 homes (I wonder how much power is assumed for a home? Maybe 7000 watts of solar panels per home.) In order to do so, they are expecting to get $1.5B in incentive money from the Federal government. The new plant will undoubtedly be several square miles in extent, and be placed on almost "free" BLM land (more than likely a zero cost, 20 year lease). In addition, it is probably going to require some new power lines and things like that - which will probably be incentivized by the government either in the form of outright grants or generous tax breaks. Once on line, I assume even more juicy tax breaks on the profits of the plant. It is hard to know for sure how much the total bill to taxpayers will be - but I think it is reasonable to assume a cost to the taxpayers of at least $2B over the 20 year or so expected life. They claim that it will create about 350 new construction jobs for one year (about $5.5M per job!).
Just for fun, I did a little math to see how that works out per house. That comes out to about $24,000 per home. An individual solar system to power an "average" home costs about $30,000. If that money were to go into solar on homes instead of in the desert, the same money would provide about 75% of the cost of the solar for the 85,000 homes - and would result in the interesting result that 85,000 homes would no longer have a power bill for a $6,000 per homeowner investment! In reality, it is a little hard to figure out the projected costs because that many installations might push the price of solar installations up, or down. I predict a downward trend.
It seems unfair that some people would get free "free" power, so to be "fair" the homeowner needs to somehow pay a "reasonable" amount. One approach would be to provide low (or no) cost loans for the extra $6,000 so that the homeowner has an invested stake and ends up paying something toward the cost of installation, with no up-front cost. The entire upfront cost to the homeowner would be zero dollars, with something like 3/4 of their current bill going to pay off the loan in 10 years. The money going back into the system could end up leveraging the money so that close to 100,000 homes could get enough power from their roofs for the same tax dollar.
It wouldn't be "free" to the homeowner, but it would be without upfront cost, would reduce their utility bill, and would give them "free" power after ten years in return for the use of their roof space.
The number of jobs necessary to install the 100,000 systems would be substantial. Assuming that a crew of three could install a system in two days - that would amount to 600,000 man-days, or about 2,400 full time positions - eight times as much as the power plant in the desert.
So, there seems to be a choice. We (the taxpayers) could use this same amount of money to do one of two things:
1 - we could give it to a large corporation (almost certainly owned by an European company like the others being built or planned in the desert). This would create power for 85,000 homes; would cost about $2B in tax dollars; would create 350 jobs in the desert; would require the building of new power lines; would result in the creation of a short lived "boom town" in the desert for a year or so, which would then have to be abandoned; would destroy several square miles of pristine desert ecology; and would result in an increase in utility bills for everyone involved (the prices will go up for this power because it is going to be sold as "offset" power to help companies and municipalities meet the new green house gas requirements).
2 - We could spend the same amount of money; provide power for 100,000 homes; not impact any land or ecology (because it is already impacted by the existing homes); would use existing power lines; and would reduce the utility bills for 100,000 tax payers (to be used to fuel the local economy); would provide 2400 jobs locally from the existing communities; and would be included in the municipalities' green house goals with no additional cost to the community.
The only downside to the second approach that I can think of is that it eliminates 100,000 customers from the utilities' income base. We would be using tax payer money to offset power, and offset utility costs, but it would also offset anticipated revenues to the power companies. There's the rub.
It is this last reason that makes me think that utilities should be either publicly owned, or not-for-profit companies. Because they are privately owned, we (the taxpayers) can't seem to make logical and reasonable decisions about how to spend our tax money to get us off of our "addiction" to fossil fuels.
Just for fun, I did a little math to see how that works out per house. That comes out to about $24,000 per home. An individual solar system to power an "average" home costs about $30,000. If that money were to go into solar on homes instead of in the desert, the same money would provide about 75% of the cost of the solar for the 85,000 homes - and would result in the interesting result that 85,000 homes would no longer have a power bill for a $6,000 per homeowner investment! In reality, it is a little hard to figure out the projected costs because that many installations might push the price of solar installations up, or down. I predict a downward trend.
It seems unfair that some people would get free "free" power, so to be "fair" the homeowner needs to somehow pay a "reasonable" amount. One approach would be to provide low (or no) cost loans for the extra $6,000 so that the homeowner has an invested stake and ends up paying something toward the cost of installation, with no up-front cost. The entire upfront cost to the homeowner would be zero dollars, with something like 3/4 of their current bill going to pay off the loan in 10 years. The money going back into the system could end up leveraging the money so that close to 100,000 homes could get enough power from their roofs for the same tax dollar.
It wouldn't be "free" to the homeowner, but it would be without upfront cost, would reduce their utility bill, and would give them "free" power after ten years in return for the use of their roof space.
The number of jobs necessary to install the 100,000 systems would be substantial. Assuming that a crew of three could install a system in two days - that would amount to 600,000 man-days, or about 2,400 full time positions - eight times as much as the power plant in the desert.
So, there seems to be a choice. We (the taxpayers) could use this same amount of money to do one of two things:
1 - we could give it to a large corporation (almost certainly owned by an European company like the others being built or planned in the desert). This would create power for 85,000 homes; would cost about $2B in tax dollars; would create 350 jobs in the desert; would require the building of new power lines; would result in the creation of a short lived "boom town" in the desert for a year or so, which would then have to be abandoned; would destroy several square miles of pristine desert ecology; and would result in an increase in utility bills for everyone involved (the prices will go up for this power because it is going to be sold as "offset" power to help companies and municipalities meet the new green house gas requirements).
2 - We could spend the same amount of money; provide power for 100,000 homes; not impact any land or ecology (because it is already impacted by the existing homes); would use existing power lines; and would reduce the utility bills for 100,000 tax payers (to be used to fuel the local economy); would provide 2400 jobs locally from the existing communities; and would be included in the municipalities' green house goals with no additional cost to the community.
The only downside to the second approach that I can think of is that it eliminates 100,000 customers from the utilities' income base. We would be using tax payer money to offset power, and offset utility costs, but it would also offset anticipated revenues to the power companies. There's the rub.
It is this last reason that makes me think that utilities should be either publicly owned, or not-for-profit companies. Because they are privately owned, we (the taxpayers) can't seem to make logical and reasonable decisions about how to spend our tax money to get us off of our "addiction" to fossil fuels.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)