Today's Minneapolis Star Tribune carries a story today in the business section on a new 2 megawatt solar farm to be built near the wind-rich zone in the far southwestern corner of Minnesota.
The Star Tribune's pitch seems to be that the intermittent nature of solar power will compliment the intermittnent nature of wind power. So on cloudy and windy days and nights we will get the wind power, and on sunny and calm days, we will have the solar power. Left unsaid is what happens on cloudy and calm days and nights, when we have doubled down on power sources that produce no energy or on sunny and windy days when the double output would overwhelm the local transmission infrastructure.
My concern is more with the land use. Unreported in the article is what the 13 acres needed for the solar project are doing today. Are the 13 acres currently productive farmland or ranchland? Or just marginal scrubland?
Two megawatts sounds like a lot, but it only equals about one standard-sized large wind turbine. The wind turbine would have a ground footprint of just a half acre, 1/26th the amount of land used by the solar farm.
Large-scale solar energy is usually placed on a flat roof of a commercial or industrial building, using largely non-productive space. A few projects have been developed in parking lots, where sun and rain covers for the automobiles double as platforms for the solar power.
In an earlier life, I helped develop a 50 megawatt natural gas-fueled power plant, that (coincidentally) covered 13 acres of land, reclaimed from a former sugar processing plant.
In addition to being a land hog, the project requires $2 million of direct subsidies from Xcel electric ratepayers and more money in indirect subsidies from ratepayers for the still above-market-price electricity.
The problems with solar, then, are two-fold: too costly and too land-intensive. Energy author Robert Bryce has been pointing out these drawback for years, yet we need to relearn these lessons day-by-day and project-by-project.
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