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What if we covered every warehouse in the mountain West with solar panels?
- vkou 3y agoThe answer to that question is 'It would cost more and produce less power than building out dedicated solar plants, which is what we should do instead, because aren't running out of land'.
- dangerlibrary 3y agoThere are certainly some places where we aren't running out of land, but I suspect super-high land values and the challenges of permitting new transmission infrastructure might make this economical closer to major metro areas.
- rnk 3y agoWhy would it cost more to do warehouses? Not discussed here.You could say we should do nothing except full scale land solar, stop houses for example. There's actually a movement to block solar at farms by the Petro industrial complex, since they want to block solar everywhere.
- maxk42 3y agoWarehouses are not uniform. If you were to pick any of the vast millions of acres of free land in the mountain west, you could simply pick a suitable flat area near existing power transmission lines and get to work. If you were trying to develop that capacity on warehouse rooftops you'll run into a variety of problems from: (1) Some warehouses do not have rooftops that lend themselves to power generation. (e.g. they include smokestacks, antennae, vents, and other features that make some of the roof unusable) (2) It is inherently more labor-intensive (and therefore expensive) to haul solar panels onto a rooftop and install them around existing infrastructure than to put them into place in a suitably-prepared empty spot on the ground. (3) Warehouses are not situated in spots that are optimally chosen for sunlight exposure and therefore may not be very productive for solar power. Many will exist in the shadows of mountains, buildings, or trees. Others exist in places where natural forces such as ice, hail, and rapid temperature swings will shorten the expected lifetimes of solar panels. (4) The inherent costs associated (labor, logistics, materials) with setting up 10,000 small solar plants and connecting them to the grid will naturally exceed the inherent costs of setting several large purpose-built locations and connecting them to the grid.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoThis. There's no good reason to couple solar panels to anything. It's some non-engineer idea that got currency - I have a house but a small yard. Hey! Put it on the roof! But if you have any choice whatsoever, do not do that. Put them in an unobstructed cheap ground-level serviceable location near the power grid. Because electricity can flow over wires for many many miles with little loss. Hell, the midwestern farmer used to be the highest-risk job for accidents. But I hear solar installers have taken the crown. The cost in human capital has to be considered as well.
- falcolas 3y agoI just want to call out that unimproved land is not free land. Someone owns it, be it private citizens, state governments, federal governments, or private trusts. Not to mention, undeveloped land (especially land flat enough for solar) is still being used, generally for livestock.
- maxk42 3y agoThe government owns the majority of the unimproved land in the US. The government does not own the majority of the warehouses in the US. For instance, in my state, the majority of the land (40 million+ acres) is owned by the government. Another 20 million acres not owned by the government is unimproved. The majority of both those quantities is not merely unimproved but not being utilized for anything at all - not even livestock. (It's desert - very expensive to produce most livestock out here.) And it's not even in the top five states in terms of area. In some places not far from here, land can be purchased privately for $5 / acre. I think you underestimate just how much unused land there is in the USA.
- emtel 3y agoJust off the top of my head: - Longer permitting delays, including structural engineering work and electrical design work to tie into the existing warehouse electrical system. - Need to rent cranes or lifts to hoist equipment onto roof. - Warehouses may need to be partially closed while roof work is being done, for safety. - Probably need to do roof penetrations for fasteners and ensure they are sealed. - Likely increase in worker death and injury rate from working on roofs instead of the ground.
- bluefirebrand 3y agoIf we're embracing solar + storage as our future energy solution we probably should be doing both. We should be building solar plants, and also supplementing it with distributed solar installs on buildings.
- ajmurmann 3y agoHow does the dedicated solar installation impact the wildlife in that area? Edit: I also wonder if there are even though sunny days in the mountain west to recover the massive carbon cost from building the solar cells in the first place. Regardless of we put them on roofs or elsewhere.
- q845712 3y agoit seems easy to undervalue undeveloped land. I think the argument being made is that we have land that's already connected to the electrical grid, already has roads and routes for servicing, already has fire mitigation and contingency plans in place, already has disrupted whatever ecological processes would have been happening if it were left undeveloped, and is just missing the last piece of solar panels, which we may as well add since we've done the rest of the development process.
- Dave_Rosenthal 3y agoThank you for saying this. Having a grid-tied building festooned with solar panels has always seemed absurd to me for this reason. It would be interesting to calculate the implied "show-off value" of the solar cells that building owners are paying relative to the utility-scale alternative--I bet it's shockingly high.
- klyrs 3y agoUnconsidered options: adding solar to parking lots, ranches and orchards. That's land which is already in use, but could bear to be a bit less sunny.
- rhacker 3y agoWhat happens when you add that much weight to a flat roof and then the snow comes? I'm guessing the snow load is just enough in most cases.
- PTOB 3y agoThis is the right question. Warehouse roofs are designed to counter snow load and wind uplift at "x" mph. Once those forces are exceeded, you can expect damage.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davnicwil 3y agothis might be a bit silly but... maybe not... could you siphon off a little bit of power from the panels to heat an array of heating wires just enough to melt snow on impact and then it'd drip off like rain?
- _Microft 3y agoNot at all. Afaik you won‘t even need wires for that. You can occasionally feed energy into the panels which produces a bit of heat there. It wouldn’t even have to melt (a lot) of snow - just enough that the bulk of it slides off.
- LgWoodenBadger 3y agoSlide off the solar-panels-on-the-flat-roof onto the flat-roof itself?
- walrus01 3y agoThere is a lot more unusable arid land in the mountain west than there are warehouse rooftops. Adding bulk commodity ground mount PV to some portions of eastern WA where there is neither ranchland/grazing or irrigrated crop would go pretty far, in addition to the already existing massive hydroelectric dams. Look at the already government owned land around the Idaho National Lab in south/eastern Idaho for similar. Massive scale ground mount PV on otherwise unusable already government-controlled land is less costly and faster to deploy than putting things on roofs. People who live in the eastern or central US states and have never spent a lot of time driving around rural areas of the "Mountain west" may also not fully appreciate how much land is not owned by any one specific person or corporation, but is already owned/controlled by either the BLM or by an individual state such as the WA Department of Natural Resources. This is very alien to how rural land ownership exists in eastern US states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
- wedn3sday 3y agoI think one advantage to putting the solar cells on warehouses is that the generation is much closer to where it gets used, reducing both infrastructure costs as well as transmission loss.
- walrus01 3y agoTrue, but it also introduces new relationship/contractual/long term problems like having a whole legal team engage with whoever owns the buildings of dozens or hundreds of Home Depots or Walmarts for a 3rd party warehouse-roof-size PV installation. And eventual need for periodic repair/replacement of the underlying roof.
- justinator 3y ago>There is a lot more unusable arid land in the mountain west than there are warehouse rooftops. What a very human-centric point of view
- walrus01 3y ago
- maxk42 3y agoIt would be a lot more expensive to put them on warehouses than the millions of acres of unused land nearby. But the mountain west also has ice and hail and solar panels tend not to live up to their expected lifetimes out here.
- bmitc 3y agoWhat are the environment effects of that?
- devoutsalsa 3y agoI met a environmental biologist (it was some similar sounding job) who does environmental impact studies for solar farms in the desert. He said lots of stuff gets displaced or killed when they install the panels. There’s no way to avoid it. It definitely stresses the environment.
- ericbarrett 3y agoThe biological soil crust in much of the Western U.S. is easily trampled (a single footprint can do it), and takes years to regenerate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_soil_crust I live by BLM (open public) land of this kind, and you can definitely see the change in flora growing on a given patch of land for several years after it has been disturbed. It may look barren, but the desert West is host to all kinds of critters: multiple species of ants, beetles of all kinds, lizards, horny toads, quail, rabbits, bobcats, ravens, hawks, owls, bees, wasps, butterflies, snakes, etc. etc. Why not put the panels on the warehouses where the land is already disturbed?
- devoutsalsa 3y agoTo your point, it can be avoided by not doing it at all. But you’re definitely 100% going to screw up the environment by installing panels on unspoiled land.
- maxk42 3y ago
- karaterobot 3y agoSo what happens for maintenance? Does the local electric concern have an easement and keys to every warehouse in the state, so they can access it whenever they need to?
- marssaxman 3y agoWhy would they need anything like that? Rooftop solar is not a new idea; I don't see why a push to install panels on lots of warehouses would require any novel practices.
- dboreham 3y agoDyson sphere phase 1.
- CliffStoll 3y agoAbout 4.4% of US electric consumption: In 2022, the USA generated 4,243 terawatt-hours of electricty. Their proposal optimistically projects 186 terawatt-hours. see https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electricity-net-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...)
- AndrewDucker 3y ago4% of the whole of the US consumption, just from Mountain West? That's amazing!
- CodeWriter23 3y agoSure, let's just seize privately owned rooftops and solar access rights for the community.
- ignormies 3y agoWhere was there any mention of "seizing"? > Neumann urges government officials to support solar-friendly policies and incentives that reduce the time and money it takes for companies to go solar.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoI don't think you know how socialist "incentives" work.
- oliwarner 3y agoI suspect you'd melt your grid infrastructure. They're already crumbling. If you start adding massive generation in places it wasn't designed, especially generation which can surge and dip as quickly as the weather. The good thing about domestic solar installations is that you can pair them with small (eg 5KWh) batteries and feed back the excess to (relatively) local demand. The home then becomes a lower burden on the grid in high demand times. Everybody wins.