On a sunny day in early December, Inside Secretary Deb Haaland stood on a nook exterior the Phoenix exurb of Buckeye, Arizona, the place about 3,000 acres of desert have been cleared and leveled to make manner for the Sonoran Photo voltaic Challenge, which is able to quickly can present energy to about 91,000 properties.
Haaland comes with excellent news for utility-scale photo voltaic and local weather hawks: The Bureau of Land Administration will evaluate three giant photo voltaic tasks proposed in Arizona and hopes to hurry up allowing for photo voltaic vitality on federal lands in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. “Photo voltaic vitality tasks on public lands may also help communities throughout the nation be a part of the local weather resolution, whereas creating good-paying jobs,” Haaland mentioned.
However these tasks also can uproot endangered Joshua timber and cactus, kill or displace threatened desert tortoises, block wildlife migration routes and hurt native communities. This places conservationists and policymakers within the troublesome place of getting to decide on between saving the desert – or the planet.
There are different methods, nonetheless, and different places for photo voltaic panels, from rooftops to farm fields parched by drought. For instance, France just lately referred to as for big parking tons to be lined with photo voltaic canopies that shade automobiles and supply as much as 11 gigawatts of recent era capability, equal to about 10 instances the three proposed tasks in Arizona.
This prompted us to ask: How a lot energy could possibly be generated by slapping photo voltaic panels not solely on the West’s huge parking tons, however on its 21,000 large field retailer roofs? We did the mathematics, and that is what we all know.
1,155 megawatts
Estimated producing capability if photo voltaic panels cowl all 370 miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, as LA officers have proposed.
37,500 gigawatt-hours per 12 months
Power output of photo voltaic canopies if all of Phoenix, Arizona’s 12.2 million parking spots are lined.
139
Variety of desert tortoises relocated to make manner for the Yellow Pine Photo voltaic Challenge in southern Nevada in 2021. Inside just a few weeks, 30 of them have been killed, most likely by badgers.
4,200 (215,000 hectares)
Avantus bought and retired grazing leases in California’s Mojave Desert this 12 months to guard wildlife habitat and Joshua timber. The Onyx Conservation Challenge is a partnership with federal and state land administration businesses to “offset” the results of the corporate’s developments elsewhere within the area.
1.3 million
Estimated variety of Joshua timber destroyed by the 2020 Dome Hearth, believed to be exacerbated by local weather change, in California’s Mojave Nationwide Protect.
An array of photo voltaic panels on prime of an Ikea retailer in Carson, California. Bing Guan/Bloomberg through Getty Photos
Word: We work from two numbers calculated by Greta Bolinger and Mark Bolinger in “Land Necessities for Utility-Scale PV: An Empirical Replace on Energy and Power Density,” revealed within the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics in March 2022:
Energy density: .35 megawatts per hectare for utility-scale, fixed-tilt photovoltaics. Most residential photo voltaic techniques are about 400 watts, or .0004 megawatts.
Power density: 447 megawatt-hours per 12 months per acre for utility-scale fixed-tilt photovoltaics. The typical American family makes use of about 10 megawatt-hours of electrical energy annually.
We used Surroundings America numbers and Google Earth measurements to search out that the common large field retailer has 3.25 acres of roof area. We used the calculations of the American Planning Affiliation to estimate that one acre has about 145 parking areas.
Further sources: BLM, EIA, Basin & Vary Watch, UC Davis, Berkeley Lab, Avantus, Primergy, American Planning Affiliation, USGS, Surroundings America, Google Earth.
Infographic by Luna Anna Archey/Excessive Nation Information
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Nation Information. He’s the writer of Sagebrush Empire: How a Distant Utah County Turned a Battleground for America’s Public Lands.
